So going back to the non-standard (in the english-speaking world) examples Karen raised that largely prompted this discussion: On Jan 23, 2004, at 10:49 AM, Karen Coyle wrote: > Note that a nonSort element is not always a full word and > doesn't always get spaces, such as in 17th and 18th century works in > French where the apostrophe was not used: Lhistoire.... In this case, > the nonSort is "L" and there are no spaces; or in Arabic, where the > nonSort is "al-", as in: al-ʻArabah al-dhahabīyah lā taṣʻad. I wonder if this would work? <titleInfo xml:lang="fr"> <nonSort>L</nonSort> <title>historie...</title> </titleInfo> <titleInfo xml:lang="ar"> <nonSort>al</nonSort> <title>Arabah</title> <nonSort>al</nonSort> <title>dhahabīyah lā taṣʻad</title> </titleInfo> If you can't make a rule that defines the space and punctuation handling for all instances in each language (e.g. "put a space after all English nonSort element content, none after French, and a hyphen after Arabic"), then you could always define in an XSLT file a set of keys that would specify such formatting depending on the content. This is analogous to the name problem, of course: <name type="personal"> <namePart type="given">Ali</namePart> <namePart type="articular">bin</namePart> <namePart type="given">Ahmed</namePart> <namePart type="articular">bin</namePart> <namePart type="given">Saleh</namePart> <namePart type="family">Al-Fulani</namePart> <displayName>Ali bin Ahmed bin Saleh Al-Fulani</displayName> </name> Sadly, this doesn't solve the sort order/formatting problem, because the only given name that matters is the first one (the others are given names for the father and grandfather respectively). So I suppose that would mean dropping the type attribute for the other given names. Or alternately, I suppose: <name type="personal"> <namePart type="given">Ali</namePart> <namePart type="family">Al-Fulani</namePart> <displayName>Ali bin Ahmed bin Saleh Al-Fulani</displayName> </name> I got this from here: http://www.arab.net/arabnames/ Then there's a rather infamous arabic name: <name type="personal"> <namePart type="given">Osama</namePart> <namePart type="articular">bin</namePart> <namePart type="family">Laden</namePart> <displayName>Osama bin Laden</displayName> </name> I get the suspicion that Laden is in fact a given name (his father's), and I have no idea how it ought to be formatted in a bibliographic reference list, except that it should not be "bin Laden, Osama"! Ugh... Bruce