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Question Regarding Sorting Topic Titles

J

JackOfAllGames

Well-known member
Hello! I have what must be a simple question, but it's confounding me so far and I'd appreciate some help.

To put it simply, when sorting titles alphabetically, how do I get the software to ignore the word "The" when a title starts with it? Must I write all titles omitting the word or appending ", The"? It seems like there should be a simple fix for this, but I'm not seeing it...and this isn't the easiest topic to search. =/

Ideally, I'd like a sorted section to look like:

Baldur's Gate
The Harpers
Neverwinter
Waterdeep

Thanks in advance!
-Jack
 
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Interesting question.

Had a quick look and it doesn't seem like it is possible.

Perhaps it would be possible to make a list (custom controlled) where you could input words you would like to be placed last in the topic name.

So that

The Ferengi System

Would appear as "The Ferengi System" in the topic header, but as "Ferengi System, The" in the left navigation pane.

Custom list in case you also want "A" to behave the same way ("Midsummer Night's Dream, A") or you use a different language than English (Der, die, das in German for instance, etc. etc).
 
Not at compy, so can't check, but if you set "The" as a prefix and sort alphabetically, wouldn't that work?
 
If prefixes are showing you end up with "The - Harpers" or "A - Midsummer Night's Dream". (Always a hyphen.)

I leave the article there for proper names where it's always included ("The Computer" in Paranoia, for example) and live with it sorting that way. If you want RW to sort it where you want but also include the article in the link when it's there, make the Topic/Article title without the article and add the article + name as an additional Name in the Manage Names dialog. (You can even pick which one shows and which doesn't in the navigation list, though the one that isn't primary will be gray instead of black.)

If you want something like what Vargr's describing, you'll want to write a suggestion in the other forum.
 
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I suggested adding a hidden Sort Name last year but couldn't gain any traction with it. With updated Names feature (previously Aliases), I'd almost hate to add yet another name field at this point.

If I really wanted to sort without the article in the topic's title, I'd probably go with Parody's suggestion for the time being.
 
I have not found a really good way to deal with these sorts of issues in RW yet. We just don't have much control of the sorting at this point. I find it easiest to just omit words like "a" and "the" at the front of topics at this point.
 
With the name feature getting so much better this should be something that gets fixed. I'd post a feature request about it if it really matters to you.
 
Can you use "Harpers, The" ?

Also, do you show aliases in your navigation pane? If so, you could have "The Harpers" and "Harpers, The" (or just "Harpers"). It will make the navigation list much longer, but will be more like an index.

Personally I would find tags and search-as-you-type features more useful to getting at my topics and articles. For not I just put things in logical containers to make them easier to find, though I do experience cognitive dissonance whenever I see another item that could logically contain the topic/article as well. My mind has always like tags more than folders.
 
I'd enter it as "Harper's, The" and add an alias of The Harpers for linking. This would be the same as a standard book index for entries like "Scallops, Pickled" and "Orc, Blackrock".
 
We considered special handling of articles within names (e.g. "the", "a", etc.), but the question of foreign languages made that vastly more complicated. The idea about letting users define the set of words to treat as articles for special handling was not something we'd thought of, so that might be a trick we can use to keep things more manageable.

If you want to see "Harpers, The", I recommend just setting that as the public name and adding an alternate name of "The Harpers" for automatic link detection. You can designate the alternate name as not for display within the navigation pane to keep it from showing up (and offending your eyes). :)
 
Not sure if RealmWorks' indexing would work with this without having to write gobs of code, but libraries use filing indicators. This is a number given in a field associated with a title and it says how many characters of the title to ignore when indexing it. So for example, for The Harpers, the filing indicator would be 4 (the 3 characters in The, plus 1 for the space). I am not a library cataloger so I may have mangled this up some.

It works with any language, but it would put the onus on the user to set it for each title that started with A, An, or The.
 
For starters we could try out Rob's suggestion with the new Name Manager system and see if that gets us where we what to be.

If that is a good workable solution, there is no reason to send in the programmers and have them chip away at this particular problem.
 
There are times I wish I could just force the order to be as I want it. In the mechanics section I like to organize my rule info with the same scheme as the print book, but the alphabetical sorting is problematic. I end up using prefixes to force the order I want, but that is not a perfect fix either.
 
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