Re: [Groff] Re: refer and Dutch names

[Ted Harding]

On 11-Feb-04 Christian Jensen wrote:
> Thank you for the information. The special problem with the name
> "'t Hart" (at least this particular one) is that he is listed in
> bibliographies as
> 
>       't Hart, Johan
> 
> but sorted under "h", i.e. you might have
> 
> Halliday, M.A.K. (1967): ...
> 't Hart, J. (1965): ..
> House, A.S. (1973): ...
> 
> This is very hard to handle in refer without breaking something else.
> 
> I have actually not seen the order "Hart, J. 't" in any bibliographies
> and ended up accepting that he was placed in the "t"-section.

This is an issue which 'refer' does not handle gracefully. Basically,
it lacks the facility to assign a sort-order independently of the
thing being sorted.

The program makeindex (which may be difficult to find now, but I can
send a copy) allows this flexibly for indexes, and it may be possible
to adapt it for bibliographies. Basically, you plant in your troff
document a line like

.IXA {Hart, J. 't@'t Hart, J. ...}

where what precedes the "@" is the sort key, and what follows the "@"
is the entry. (The ".IXA" macro is something that needs to be defined
for this use. I have used ".IXA" for author index, ".IXS" for subject
index, ".IXT" for title index, etc.; they're all basically the same,
and the reason for making them different is so that a simple alias
of any one to ".IX" allows separate creation of author, subject and
title indexes, etc.).

Thus the above entry would sort prior to

.IXA {Hart, K. 't@'t Hart, J. ...}

but subsequent to

.IXA {Hart, J. ...}

(where the absence of "@" means that the entry itself is also the
sort key).

I don't know enough about the TeX utility 'bibtex' to say whether
this also allows a similar usage.

Ted.


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Date: 11-Feb-04                                       Time: 10:14:11
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