Authors: Order and initials

nonglobal
Hi. Thanks to the Zotero team and for the support in this area.
I learning the language to create some styles. For now, I have some questions that I can't resolve with the on-line documentation. I'm not a programmer, so I proceed by try and error and by observation other styles. The questions, are about "Author" field.

- How CSL manage the order of 'last' and 'first' names.
- How CSL manage the initials of first names.

If you have some other documentanation to learn about Zotero Styles (other than Zotero's web site) it can help me/us.

Thanks in advance.
  • bdarcus
    http://www.zotero.org/support/dev/csl_syntax_summary#authors
  • adamsmith
    also, if you ask how to do sth. specific. there's usually someone willing to help.
  • felwert
    Regarding you first point, order of names, I thinks this is handled by the "names-as-sort-order" property (which might not be obvious at the first glance). "Sort order" refers to the "Family Name, Given Name" order, so names-as-sort-order="all" would always print the names with family name first, while names-as-sort-order="first" only prints the first name in that order, all subsequent names with given name first.

    But regarding your second question, I don't know how to actually solve this, so I'd also be interested in a solution. As far as I understood the documentation, the "form" attribute allows for "long", which is "Some Author", and "short", which is "Author". But there are styles that require "S. Author". Is this currently possible in Zotero/CSL?

    If it isn't, maybe one should allow form to have more possible values. E.g. "abbreviated". Or, if this is relevant, "abbrev-first" (for "S. Author") and "abbrev-all" (for "S. A.").
  • fbennett
    @felwert,

    I'm not very familiar with this part of the kit yet, but I remember there is an "initialize-with" attribute that seems meant to serve this purpose (it takes the punctuation, if any, to follow the initials as its argument).
  • felwert
    @fbennett,

    of course your totally right. I just missed that. Thanks for the hint!
  • Benjamin
    You also need the property "sort-separator" set if you want the last name to show up first. If it is not set "name-as-sort-order" is ignored.
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