[Tex/LaTex] BibTeX: Abbreviate first name (aka given name) to 2 or 3 letters (not 1)

bibtex

BibTeX can abbreviate first names, e.g. change Smith, John to J. Smith. In some languages, certain (not all) first names must be abbreviated with more than one letter (it's not optional as in the case of Ch. for Charles). How can I force BibTeX to do this for particular first names?

EDIT: I encounter this all the time, including for my own name which should be abbreviated Sz rather than S. I used to work around the problem by hand editing the reference list in the final version of the paper, but I'd prefer using BibTeX for everything if possible.

Requested example:

.tex file:

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
Text \cite{kovacs, smith}.

\bibliographystyle{abbrv}
\bibliography{references}
\end{document}

.bib file:

@Book{smith,
  author  = "Peter Smith",
  title   = "Title 1",
  year    = 1980,
  publisher = "Addison-Wesley"
}

@Book{kovacs,
  author  = "Csaba Kov\'{a}cs",
  title   = "Title 2",
  year    = 1986,
  publisher = "Addison-Wesley"
}

The output I get:

Text [1, 2].

References

[1] C. Kovács. Title 2. Addison-Wesley, 1986.

[2] P. Smith. Title 1. Addison-Wesley, 1980.

I need to tell bibtex that for Csaba Kovács I need to get Cs. Kovács in the output, and not C. Kovács, as this is incorrect. The document is in English, so this is not a babel-issue. This applies only to certain author names, and it's because in Hungarian C and Cs are considered to be distinct units of the alphabet.

Best Answer

Just replace the first name in question, say Csaba, with {\relax Cs}aba.

More generally, place the part of the name that is to be unaffected by the abbreviation inside a TeX group, which is a field that's delimited by { and }, and insert the command \relax at the beginning of that group.

Another example of how to make use of this method: To help one's readers distinguish the works authored by "Timothy Jones" and "Thomas Jones", one could set the respective author fields to "{\relax Tim}othy Jones" and "{\relax Th}omas Jones".

Here's an MWE that suggests how to deal with four authors whose last name is "Kovács" and first names begin with "C".

enter image description here

\RequirePackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{references.bib}
@Book{kovacs_ca,
  author  = "Carla Kov{\'a}cs",
  title   = "Title 1",
  year    = 1986,
  publisher = "Addison-Wesley"
}
@Book{kovacs_ch,
  author  = "{\relax Ch}arles Kov{\'a}cs",
  title   = "Title 2",
  year    = 1987,
  publisher = "Addison-Wesley"
}
@Book{kovacs_cs,
  author  = "{\relax Cs}aba Kov{\'a}cs",
  title   = "Title 3",
  year    = 1988,
  publisher = "Addison-Wesley"
}
@Book{kovacs_cy,
  author  = "{\relax Cyr}ill Kov{\'a}cs",
  title   = "Title 4",
  year    = 1989,
  publisher = "Addison-Wesley"
}
\end{filecontents}

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\bibliographystyle{abbrv}

\begin{document}
\nocite{*}
\bibliography{references}
\end{document}
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