Re: [docbook] On family/given/first/last names

[doug <doug.duboulay@gmail.com>]

On Tuesday 11 December 2007 03:57, Markus Hoenicka wrote:
> Quoting Geraint North <geraint@transitive.com>:
> > Out of interest, what do people use the
> > firstname/surname/lastname/givenname distinction for?
>
> Naming conventions are a pet peeve for everyone involved in generating
> citations and bibliographies for scholarly publications. Scientific
> journals and publishers have fairly strict rules how to display names
> of authors and editors. In order to do that, you need to know the
> function of each part of the name. Assume the journal wants the names
> displayed as "Last, First M.". A guy named Luis Lopez Penabad would
> obviously be displayed as "Penabad, Luis L." although this is all
> wrong. He is Spanish, has one firstname (Luis) and two lastnames
> (Lopez Penabad), one from each of his parents. The correct display
> form is therefore "Lopez Penabad, Luis". The
> firstname/surname/lastname/givenname elements somewhat help to get
> this right, although you still face lots of problems with non-Western
> names, and even with some standard US names. E.g. if a person goes by
> his second "firstname", like L. Clinton Webb, the current DocBook
> markup has a hard time to catch this.
>
> regards,
> Markus

I always thought bibtex was the defacto standard for bibliography
ordering and formatting with its First von Last Jr.  splitting 
- as described e.g. point 18 here:
   http://newton.ex.ac.uk/tex/pack/bibtex/btxdoc/node8.html  

My guess was that most journals accepted latex style manuscripts with 
bibtex bibliographies and just applied a journal specific
style. I would expect some standard DocBook markup to 
reflect that, just for consistency as an interchange format 
and for standardizing bibliography formatting and ordering styles. 

cheers
Doug