Sonny Software

Is there any way to force Bookends to keep the author's name as typed when producing bibliographies? I can't see anything in the user guide.

I have a lot of mixed bibliographies and I type (for example) Christian names as "Smith, John" and Muslim names as "Abdallah Saleh". But when I output the list, "Smith, John" comes up as "Smith, John" (which is fine) but "Abdallah Saleh" comes out as "Saleh, Abdallah" regardless of whether or not I've used a comma. This is wrong because Saleh is not Abdallah's family name but his father's name.

The result is even more absurd if I have a name like "Muhammad ibn Ahmed" which ends up as "Ahmed, Muhammed ibn" (ie, literally "Ahmed, Muhammed son of"). Anyone looking up Muhammad's name in the bibliography (esp if I have it referenced as "Muhammed 2004") is not going to look under "Ahmed". (And if his "full" name is Muhammad ibn Ahmed ibn Salim ibn Abdul ba Aqil as-Saqqaf there's not even any logic to putting him under "Ahmed"...)

I'm sure other users must have this problem. Aren't some Asian names also not reversible?

Or has this been resolved in Version 10...

Iain

What style guide are you using? I'm doing a lot of Persian, Arabic, and Indic names in my biblio and Chicago is fairly explicit on formatting in the bibliography.

So "Fulan ibn Fulan" should appear in the bibliography as "Ibn Fulan, Fulan." Essentially the formatting of names is forced into the "First Name Last Name" paradigm.

If you are using published works you can follow the LOC cataloging information. If you are using original manuscripts, you can group them in the biblio and create a unique and consistent format for them that breaks the "First Name Last Name" set-up without affecting the rest of your bibliography.

I guess in your example I'd be trying to get "Fulan ibn Fulan" to appear in the bibliography as "Fulan ibn Fulan". I (and a lot of others including some of the people I cite) object to being forced into a Western way of doing things and prefer to be cited by their own names and not by someone else's name (father, grandfather, distant ancestor). (I actually quite like it when I'm cited in bibliographies under my first name...)

I have a similar problem with genealogies where most of the software insists on a family name. (Aren't there any Icelandic software developers?)

Sounds like doing it by hand is the only way around. But I'm surprised that Bookends doesn't make the comma the significant operator, ie if there's a comma then the name is "backwards" and if there isn't, then it isn't.

I used to do what what you're asking by putting the comma at the end of the name in author field. So it would look like "Fulan ibn Fulan," That should keep the names from being transposed.

If you just want Bookends to output the name exactly as it is in the Author field, wouldn't putting a comma at the end of the name work?

From the user guide:

If the author is an institution, place a comma after the last character and Bookends will not attempt to format it when creating a bibliography. Commas elsewhere in the name will be output as entered. For example, you would enter "The American Council on Diet,
Health, and Fitness" as

The American Council on Diet, Health, and Fitness,

Ah. Perhaps I should have RTFM a little more closely...