biblatex: Putting thin spaces between initials

Question

This question led to a new feature in a package:
biblatex

Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style, rule 2.1.5 states "Add little or no space within strings of initials."

If biblatex's firstinits option is enabled, "all first and middle names will be rendered as initials" (p. 54 of the manual). This, however, will put ties (~), i.e. non-breakable interword spaces between the initials. (See the .bbl-file of my compiled example.) How can I replace these ties with thin spaces (\,) and thus follow Bringhurst?

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[firstinits=true]{biblatex}

\usepackage{filecontents}

\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@book{Knu86,
  author = {Knuth, Donald E.},
  year = {1986},
  title = {The \TeX book},
}
\end{filecontents}

\bibliography{\jobname}

\begin{document}

\nocite{*}

\printbibliography

\end{document}

Answer 1

[update for biber 0.9+, April 2011]

You can customise this with \bibinitdelim:

\renewrobustcmd*{\bibinitdelim}{\,}

See the biblatex manual section 3.12.4 for a list of all name spacing macros.

---

Old answer:

Just to update this - biber 0.8.3/biblatex 1.3 have just been released and they address this issue. Biber no longer hard codes any typsetting in names---it only uses macros which can be changed from biblatex. See section 3.11.4 of the new biblatex manual.

[removed misleading biber 0.8.2 comments which are now obsolete]

Actually, thinking about this a little more coherently, what we're going to do soon is just make this a macro in biblatex so you can redefine any initials separators in biblatex. Probably in 1.3/0.8.3

Answer 2

This solution isn't entirely general for when firstinits is not true, but otherwise it does exactly what you are asking for:

\documentclass{article}
\RequirePackage[firstinits=true]{biblatex}
\bibliography{xampl}
\renewcommand*{\mkbibnamefirst}[1]{{\let~\,#1}}
\makeatother
\begin{document}
 \nocite{whole-collection}
 \printbibliography
\end{document}

This code uses biblatex's hook into how to print the ‘first name’, which in this case is the initials, and substitutes ~ for \,. (I'm not sure if the nested set of braces are required, but it doesn't hurt to be careful.)

When firstinits is not in effect, this will end up putting thin spaces between someone's first name and their initial, which is probably not desirable. So you might want to qualify the definition above as

\renewcommand*{\mkbibnamefirst}[1]{{\iffirstinits{\let~\,}{}#1}}

Answer 3

The separator between initials is one of the few things that is defined in the file biblatex.bst rather than at the LaTeX level. If you look at a biblatex style file, you'll find that the biblatex kernel provides the full names and initials. Tracing back, these come from BibTeX's format.name$ function. I suspect the only way to customise this (currently) is to hack the process to do a search-and-replace on the initials. A longer-term solution is, of course, to make a feature request.

To explain how firstinits works, it's a switch which you can use inside a biblatex style to select either the full names or initials as supplied to the style by the biblatex kernel. So the formatting of the initials themselves is already done when the style gets the data.