biblatex -- citation versus bib style first name first and dashed/idem

Question

after much effort and time, I am finally coming closer to what I need with biblatex. Jurabib was really nice but didn't integrate with babelbib at all and it's built-in feature for internationalization didn't work for spacing before punctuations. It was in fact very limited. I am happy to see that biblatex plays with babel directly with the autoload option, within the bibliography.

I need full citations in footnotes, eventually with a page number added, while keeping the full reference (without any citation-specific page number) in the bibliography at the end. So the styles should be approximately the same. It's a pretty common need for History, Humanities and it seems, for law studies also. I cannot figure out why it is so hard to get such a simple setup up and running before biblatex, as I said before, and now with biblatex although I appreciate its advantage for correctly internationalized bibliography. Especially the spacing before punct which Jurabib did mess up!

This is how far I get for today: the style for citation versus bibliography isn't the same. I remember it was kind of tricky with Jurabib to get the same but it was possible. And with other packages for Bibtex it was even possible to point directly to the same .bst style file, with or without additional bibliographystyle-alike argument. How to get the same style for (footnote) citation and bibliography with biblatex?

Precisely, why are first name reversed in the citation versus bib? (I need the firstname before). In the example below, the first name is only first with the citation. And how to get the dashed OR Idem behaviour for the citation (dashed works for bibliography)? See the example below, Harry Collins isn't dashed or Idem in the citation. Besides, I am not really sure about autolang=. Should I use hyphen or other? I don't understand the difference and some insights about that are welcome. Thanks.

\documentclass[french]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[latin9]{inputenc}
\usepackage{verbatim}
\usepackage[english,ngerman,frenchb]{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}
\usepackage[style=verbose-ibid,backend=bibtex8,autolang=hyphen,dashed,
ibidtracker=constrict,opcittracker=constrict,loccittracker=constrict,idemtracker=constrict]{biblatex}
\renewcommand*{\newunitpunct}{\addcomma\space}
\addbibresource{C:/file.bib}

\begin{document}
\cite{collinscha}.

\cite{collinsoth}

\cite[256]{binetmag}.

\cite{binetmag}.

\printbibliography
\end{document}

gives,

Answer 1

Biblatex has many formatting directives for names. One of them is last-first/first-last which is used to print the names. You have to change to the first-last directive.

A simple way is to load the xpatch package (i.e., \usepackage{xpatch}) and then

\xpatchbibmacro{author}{\printnames}{\printnames[first-last]}{}{}  
\xpatchbibmacro{editor}{\printnames}{\printnames[first-last]}{}{}

Answer 2

I think you should use biblatex-dw which is introduced by:

biblatex-dw is a small collection of styles for the biblatex package. It was designed for citations in the Humanities and offers some features that are not provided by the standard biblatex styles.