When the author’s name cannot be found in the ‘From:’ mail
header, a fallback author name and attribution string must be supplied.
The fallback author name is contained in the variable
sc-default-author-name and the fallback attribution string is
contained in the variable sc-default-attribution. Default values
for these variables are "Anonymous" and "Anon",
respectively. Note that in most circumstances, getting the default
author name or attribution is a sign that something is set up
incorrectly.
Also, if the preferred attribution, which you specified in your
sc-preferred-attribution-list variable cannot be found, a
secondary method can be employed to find a valid attribution string. The
variable sc-use-only-preference-p controls what happens in this
case. If the variable’s value is non-nil, then
sc-default-author-name and sc-default-attribution are
used, otherwise, the following steps are taken to find a valid
attribution string, and the first step to return a non-nil,
non-empty string becomes the attribution:
"x-attribution" key.
nil, non-empty attribution string in the
attribution alist.
sc-default-attribution is used.
Once the attribution string has been automatically selected, a number of
things can happen. If the variable sc-confirm-always-p is
non-nil, you are queried for confirmation of the chosen
attribution string. The possible values for completion are those strings
in the attribution alist, however you are not limited to these choices.
You can type any arbitrary string at the confirmation prompt. The string
you enter becomes the value associated with the "sc-lastchoice"
key in the attribution alist.
Once an attribution string has been selected, Supercite will force the
string to lower case if the variable sc-downcase-p is
non-nil.
Two hook variables provide even greater control of the attribution
selection process. The hook sc-attribs-preselect-hook is run
before any attribution is selected. Likewise, the hook
sc-attribs-postselect-hook is run after the attribution is
selected (and the corresponding citation string is built), but before
these values are committed for use by Supercite. During the
post-selection hook, the local variables attribution and
citation are bound to the appropriate strings. By changing these
variables in your hook functions, you change the attribution and
citation strings used by Supercite. One possible use of this would be
to override any automatically derived attribution string when it is only
one character long; e.g., you prefer to use "initials" but the
author only has one name.