TEX82@SRI-AI.ARPA (06/06/84)
BibTeX, LaTeX's bibliography lookup program, needs:
* a grammar of author names--that is, a BNF specification of
the components of a name, and
* a specification of how to print a name, in various styles, given
its parse tree.
Possible style choices for names include last name first or last and,
perhaps, complete first/middle names or initials.
The rules should handle almost all cases encountered in technical
literature, including 'Brinch Hansen, Per' and 'Jean-Pierre van der
Waerden, Jr.' but need not cover cases like 'John Thompson, Earl of
Rumford'. The grammar need not be logically complete; for example, it
would be all right to consider 'Colonel' to be the first name of
'Colonel John Blimp', if that produces the correct printed version.
Please contact me if you know of anything like this.
Leslie Lamport
[Please forward this to anyone who might have an answer. Leslie has
been doing a great job building the LaTeX friendly user interface to
TeX, and a great many of us can benefit from any increased functionality
he can develop for the bibliography preprocessor. -- KIL]