Quote:
Originally Posted by transmitthis
Just as an aside, is there real need to have Author And Author_sort, would it not be possible to just have Author, and have the sort based on the way that is displayed.
Then just have options under a settings tab on exactly how you want it to be displayed,
FN, LN, etc
|
Yes, there is a need for author_sort.
First, you might be one of the very large number of people who want to see FN LN but sort LN, FN. How do you do that without something like author_sort, either stored or computed? Second, even when displaying LN, FN (and sorting by that), there are many cases where what I see is not how I sort. For example, "von Braun, Wernher" should sort under 'B', and I don't want to see "Braun, Wernher von". The name "d'Orléans, Philippe" should sort under 'O'. Many Asian names, and in particular Chinese names, are written LN FN and should sort LN FN even though there is no comma in the name; an example is Sun Tzu which should sort under 'S'.
Unfortunately these rules are not fixed, which is one reason that the "computed" option is impractical. I know people with names of the form 'van X', some of whom insist that their last name is 'van X' and some of whom insist that their last name is 'X'. One should respect the wishes of the person whose name it is. Another reason the "computed" option is impractical is the difficulty of identifying the components of names such as "Catalina de Salazar y Palacios". We need human intervention to know what words are which part of the person's name.
If you don't care about all of this complexity then set the author sort tweak to "copy". After the recalc (assuming you have books in your library), authors will sort how they appear and you can ignore author_sort.
I agree that it should be possible to simplify the control of the various options and tweaks related to author sorting, but I am not interested in doing the work. It would take a fair amount of time and create no end of controversy for zero personal benefit.
Edit: it is worth noting that when I added the 'names' variant of the text-multiple custom column, the very first comment on the feature was a request to add the equivalent of author_sort.