A thing I’m noticing as I learn tools like #pandoc and #citeproc is that there’s a very long tail to the learning curve. (Is that a mixed metaphor?) Just when I think I’ve got things working correctly in the bibliography, multi-part last names like van Dijk come along and are processed in ways I don’t expect.
I’m slowly putting together a somewhat narrative blog post about how I’m dealing with this sort of thing. I think those of us from the humanities appreciate narrative formats & examples!
@drbjork Thanks for asking—it's not urgent. I'm using biblatex. I usually cite things in MLA, but my seminar is using APA. I'm not sure if the unexpected name behavior is from the apa.csl I'm using or something else.
For now, I'm "fixing" it by wrapping multi-part author names with curly braces:
author = {{van Dijk}, Teun A.}
This outputs the name as van Dijk, T.A. instead of Dijk, T.A. van in the bibliography.
Do you know if {van Dijk} is a bad pattern long-term for other citation styles?
@foureyedsoul I seem to recall that the APA Publication Manual states that names should be handled that way, so it's a bug, not a feature. Other citation styles that deal with 'von' and 'van' and so on in the more expected way will break on {van Dijk}.
@foureyedsoul Aww, forget that, I got it wrong: http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2017/05/whats-in-a-name-two-part-surnames-in-apa-style.html
Blame `apa.csl`! 😉
@drbjork Thank you so much! Eventually I might figure out how to alter .csl files, but I’ll start with simpler goals first—like finishing up these papers! 😅
@foureyedsoul Try a bug report at https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles before you start tweaking .csl files! 😉
@foureyedsoul I had the same sort of experience.
would love to see a link to wherever your putting this.
Just now acquainting myself w/ your account, so if it's easily findable, no worries.
@deejoe Hey, thanks for being interested. It’ll probably be a week or two before I have it written, but it’ll end up just on my blog here: http://ryanpatrickrandall.com/posts/
It’ll effectively be a post about what I’ve learned beyond this tutorial, which is a great place to start: https://programminghistorian.org/lessons/sustainable-authorship-in-plain-text-using-pandoc-and-markdown
@foureyedsoul What source format for bibliography do you use? What citation style? (I made my dissertation with pandoc so I have some experience with it.)