Supercite employs a number of heuristics to decipher the author's name base on the `From:' field. Supercite can recognize `From:' fields with the following forms:
From: John Xavier Doe <doe@speedy.computer.com>
From: "John Xavier Doe" <doe@speedy.computer.com>
From: doe@speedy.computer.com (John Xavier Doe)
From: computer!speedy!doe (John Xavier Doe)
From: doe%speedy@computer.com (John Xavier Doe)
From: computer!speedy!doe (John Xavier-Doe)
From: computer!speedy!doe (John Xavier-Doe -- Decent Hacker)
From: doe@speedy.computer.com
From: computer!speedy!doe
Note that some author fields (as in example 7 above) will contain a
descriptive title. The user can choose to ignore the title, while still
recognizing hyphenated names (as in the second to last example above),
through the use of a regular expression in the variable
sc-titlecue-regexp. This variable has the default value of
"\\\\s +-+\\\\s +".
Some author names may contain non-alphanumeric characters, especially if
the author's name is extracted from their email terminus. You can
specify that those characters in the author's name be converted to spaces
with the variable sc-spacify-name-chars. This is a list of
characters suitable for memq. Default value for this variable is
'(?_ ?* ?+ ?=).
For `From:' lines matching one of these styles, supercite will be
able to pick out the author's full name (i.e., "John Xavier Doe")
and the author's email terminus or email name (i.e., "doe"). In
examples 8 and 9 above, the author's name will be the email terminus
(i.e., "doe"). The name extracted by supercite is then split into
its individual components and kept in the attribution list either for
supercite's automatic use, or for presentation to you in a completing
confirmation. When asked to confirm the selected attribution, supercite
will present you with this list, but you can add new attributions to the
list by just typing it in at the prompt. The selected attribution
(whether completed or added) is remembered as the selected attribution
for future operations or completions.
Many names also have common nicknames which supercite cannot
automatically decipher. Therefore, supercite consults a variable
sc-nicknames-alist which contains a list of common name to
nickname associations. While supercite cannot automatically use a
nickname as the attribution string, matching nicknames will be presented
to you when attribution confirmation is requested (See section Post-yank Formatting Commands). Any part of the author's name can match an entry
in this list, and one name can match more than one nickname. The list
contains associations of the form:
(NAME NICKNAME)
Default value for this variable is:
'(("Michael" "Mike")
("Daniel" "Dan")
("David" "Dave")
("Jonathan" "John")
("William" "Bill")
("Elizabeth" "Beth")
("Elizabeth" "Betsy")
("Kathleen" "Kathy")
("Smith" "Smitty"))