Attributions

The attribution string is the part of the author's name that will be used in a composed non-nested citation string to acknowledge the originator of a section of text. Supercite scans the various mail headers present in the original article and uses a number of heuristics to extract strings which it puts into the attribution list. This list contains such information as the author's first, middle, and last names, the author's initials, and the author's email terminus. It is consulted during automatic composition of the citation string, and will be the list presented to you if attribution confirmation is selected (also see section Replying and Yanking). The variable sc-preferred-attribution allows you to determine which part of the author's name should be used when supercite composes automatic citation strings. The value of this variable must be one of the following quoted symbols:

emailname

the author's email terminus.

initials

the author's initials.

firstname

the author's first name.

lastname

the author's last name.

middlename1

the author's first middle name.

Middle name indexes can be any positive integer greater than zero, though it is unlikely that many authors will supply more than one middle name, if that many. Default value for sc-preferred-attribution is 'firstname.

When, for whatever reason, the author's name cannot be found in the `From:' mail header, a default author name and attribution string must be supplied. The default author name is set in the variable sc-default-author-name (default value is "Anonymous"), and the default attribution string is contained in the variable sc-default-attribution, (default value is "Anon"). Note that in most circumstances, getting the default author name or attribution is a sign that something is set up incorrectly.

Also, if your preferred attribution cannot be found, or is either nil or the empty string, a secondary method can be employed to find a valid attribution string. The variable sc-use-only-preference-p controls what happens in this case. If sc-use-only-preference-p is non-nil, then sc-default-author-name and sc-default-attribution are used, otherwise, the following steps are taken to find a valid attribution string. The first step to return a non-nil, non-empty string becomes the attribution:

1. Use the author's first name.
2. Find the first non-nil, non-empty attribution string in the attribution list.
3. If the variable sc-confirm-always-p is non-nil, then you are queried for an attribution string with a completing read. The possible values for completion are those strings in the attribution list, however, you can override all presented strings by simply typing in your attribution at the prompt.
4. sc-default-attribution is used.

Finally, once a legal attribution string is found, you can force the string to lower case characters by setting the variable sc-downcase-p to non-nil.