Chris, I assure you that I always try to write as succinctly as possible. Heaven knows I'm busy, and every minute is valuable.
But as you can see, some issues can be pretty complex. Not everything can be covered in 5 lines of text. Repeatedly insulting and dismissing fellow MobileRead posters can be done in 5 lines or fewer, as we've seen. But not when you're sincerely trying to get to the bottom of a software issue instead of sucking up to the developer all the time. My main goal here is to improve Marvin – not to suck up to Kris.
The solution is very easy: just respect the meta-tag field, currently (unfortunately) titled "Author sort" in Marvin. (This has been mechanically copied from Calibre's user interface by Marvin; "author sort" is programmer's jargon instead of standard English, but whatever...) Whatever is in that meta-tag field, determines how authors are sorted. That's it, issue solved.
Now, if that meta-tag field happens to be empty, use the data from the other, "Author" field, for sorting purposes, but do not fix it automatically. So, if the "Author" field contains "Ernest Hemingway" and the "Author sort" field is empty, Hemingway would be sorted according to "E" – thereby signaling to the Marvin user: "Oops! Something must be wrong with my meta-tags, because I'm seeing Hemingway sorted under E. Ah, yes, my 'Author sort' field for that book is empty – so, let's just put 'Hemingway, Ernest' there, and everything will be fine. Yep, issue solved!"
That's my solution in as brief a nutshell as I can currently put it. (I should have departed for lunch a while ago.) If there is interest, I can upload my extremely detailed messages on this subject, that I sent to Kris over the last few weeks, to an impromptu webpage, so that everyone can examine the issue in more detail. (All of this should have taken place in a Beta-testers' group prior to a public release, of course...)
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