[XeTeX] Incorrect handling of name prefixes by biblatex (van, de)

[Wilfred van Rooijen]

Hi,

I don't know if the following helps, it seems basic bibtex so I assume you already know. But just in case, the following example comes from the Latex Companion:

"Johannes Martinus Albertus van de Groene Heide" (it may seem far-fetched but this kind of name is fairly common in The Netherlands)

The "van de" is detected as the "von-part" and dealt with accordingly. But note that if you input as "Johannes Martinus Albertus Van de Groene Heide" it goes wrong, because the 'von'-part is detected from the "first non-capitalized word" in the name. I guess that it is then basically the question how the "von"-part is typeset in your BST file. In French it seems to be common to use (small) capitals for the family name (i.e. Bertrand GARNIER, Gerald RIMPAULT). I don't know if this also applies to the "von-part", i.e. is it Yvan de la PORTE or Yvan DE LA PORTE?

Note the following: indeed, in Dutch it is common to capitalize the first letter of the "von"-part if the format is "last name, first name". Thus:

W.F.G. van Rooijen  - but
Van Rooijen, W.F.G.

In The Netherlands, my name would be sorted under "R". In your example, you'd have "Van Opstal, ...", but to my mind "VAN OPSTAL, ..." looks weird. In that case, I would prefer "Van OPSTAL", because the 'van' is not considered part of the family name (in Dutch it is know as a "tussenvoegsel", "intermediate part").

Wilfred



--- On Mon, 1/11/10, Pierre Morel <pier.morel at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Pierre Morel <pier.morel at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [XeTeX] Incorrect handling of name prefixes by biblatex (van, de)
> To: "Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms" <xetex at tug.org>
> Date: Monday, 1 November, 2010, 1:22 AM
> Isn't the language field used for the
> hyphenation of the title of the article ?
> 
> This is different from the language of the text in which an
> article is cited (using named references).
> Indeed, biblatex handles that well (this is why I picked
> it) : in the french part it uses small capitals for the
> names and "et" to separate authors, in the english part, it
> uses lower case for the names and "and" as separator.
> But this prefix problem remains.
> 
> 
> Le 31 oct. 2010 à 16:57, Carsten Ziegert a écrit :
> 
> > As far as I know, biblatex allows the use of a
> "language" field and
> > capitalizes the name prefixes accordingly.
> > 
> > Carsten
> > 
> > Am Sonntag, den 31.10.2010, 16:15 +0100 schrieb Pierre
> Morel:
> >> Hello
> >> 
> >> Here is another thesis-related question, but in a
> different mail, because the subject is completely
> different.
> >> 
> >> My thesis is French and English, and I use the
> biblatex package for the bibliography (with the apa style
> and the natbib option).
> >> Everything goes as wanted, but for the names with
> prefixes (example : "van Opstal", "Pi Ku", etc...).
> >> In French, the names are supposed to be in small
> capitals, however, the "van" and "pi" of the examples above
> are in lower case, while the rest of the name is in small
> capitals (with of course a "big" capital at the beginning) :
> I have for example (van OPSTAL, 1989), which is rather
> ugly.
> >> I noticed that the prefixes are stored in a
> different field in the .bbl file and that I could prevent
> the problem by moving the prefix back in the name field, but
> this workaround is VERY tedious and not perfect.
> >> 
> >> So is there a way to have a proper handling of
> these composed names with my current settings ?
> >> 
> >> Thanks
> >> 
> >> Pierre
> >> 
> >> PS : last, when not used with the first name and
> initials, the "van" should be capitalized "Van", which is
> not the case (but this problem is of less importance)
> >> 
> >> 
> >>
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> > -- 
> > Carsten Ziegert
> > Association SIL / Chad
> > mobile: +235 63.78.58.00
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> > http://www.sil.org
> > 
> > 
> > 
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> 
> 
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