Two letter initials in bibliography

Question

I have the following author field in a bibtex file:

author = "Lastname, Theo and Surname, Sam"

In the reference list, when using a style that applies initials, I want it to print:

Th. Lastname and S. Surname

instead of

T. Lastname and S. Surname

Is there any way to do this?

Answer 1

This is explained rather well in the document TameTheBeast. The solution is to write Theo as

{\relax Th}eo

in the bibliography file. This way {\relax Th} is treated as a single special character by the bibtex processor and in particular it is not shortened to just T when creating the abbreviation. A "special character" is any group {\...} at the top level within in an entry with first character a backslash \. The main use of this is for accented characters.

\documentclass{article}

\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@Article{myart,
  author = {Lastname, {\relax Th}eo and Surname, Sam},
  title = {Title},
  journal = {J. Jour.},
  year = 1983,
  volume = 27,
  number = 2,
  pages = {31--38}
}
\end{filecontents}

\begin{document}

\cite{myart}

\bibliographystyle{abbrv}
\bibliography{\jobname}

\end{document}