Re: Long file names in Dired

[Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se>]

Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl> writes:

> Though I don't agree with you about the publishing
> industry: authors usually suck at typography, and
> they usually don't care anyway.

It is just something they never did. I child can learn
it. I don't know what the publishing houses do all
day. Typesetting in LaTeX (or even old-school groff
which is what I think O'Reilly uses) isn't easy first
day but after a while you understand how it works.
Then, after you get the details the way you want it is
is only a matter of using 99% of the same over and
over. So it should have been standardized one zillion
times over by now.

> The problem is that if LaTeX happens to hyphenate
> the author's name, or the publisher's name, or the
> title, or the university name, etc. (which is quite
> possible), it should do it according to the rules
> for the language of that particular field.

Is that why you hate BibLaTeX? ... :J

Did you consider disabling hyphenation altogether?

> (Another thing - as I mentioned - is that that whole
> first/von/last/jr stuff is quite English-centered.
> In non-Germanic languages this is sometimes
> completely irrelevant - take Russian with its
> "patronimicum", which is similar to the middle name,
> but is someting else (it's basically things like
> "John, son of Jack, Smith).

Yes. In Sweden we instead have that "incorporated" in
the last name, often: Svensson, Bengtsson, ...
(literally Sven's son, Bengt's son, etc., but they are
just family names: the father isn't for this reason
Sven and Bengt as with the Russian system).

> In Polish, we don't have "von"

Why - did the communists wipe out the entire Polish
nobility? Alright. This is interesting, but what does
it have to do with BibLaTeX?

> and using "jr" is very rare, though possible, but
> seems (at least to me) extremely pretentious.

It can also be functional, to separate the two persons
with the same name. For example, the famous American
and Mexican boxers - fathers and sons:

    Floyd Mayweather Sr./Jr.
    Julio César Chávez Sr./Jr.

> Or take Icelandic, where the name structure is
> totally different than in other languages - many
> Icelanders /don't even have/ the family name (and
> they sort their names by the first name!).

What does it matter what exceptional and goofy
convention some people have somewhere around the
world? The do have *names* on Iceland. A BibLaTeX
entry has an author field. Just type the name of the
the industrious Icelander there!

> And there are quite a few people who /do/ care about
> the references. For instance, I work for a journal,
> where we (with a friend of mine) are responsible for
> (among others) typesetting the papers. We sometimes
> spend/waste quite a lot of time on bibliographies
> (mainly because authors "don't care" - if they
> actually used BibTeX and not hand-crafted,
> inconsistent formatting, things would be a lot
> easier for us...). I even wrote an Emacs utility
> which helps transform such inconsistent pile of s##t
> into proper markup.

Of course references should be correct and consistent
and software (including Emacs modes) should support
it. I think BibLaTeX does its job and the problem (?)
with lack of support for "national hyphenation" isn't
anything I would ever worry about.

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573