Biblatex: no period/dot after initials if bibtex-entry firstname is only one letter

Question

After several hours on this webpage, I decided to change to biblatex and have already configured according to my preferences. Apart from an easy way to change the order of certain fields of a given citation-style (alphabetic in my case), biblatex does almost everything I need.

However, it won't put a period (or dot or whatever it is called) after the initials of the first names if the bibtex-firstname-entry has only letter. Here is an example of my biblatex-definitions

%
%
\documentclass{article}
%
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[english]{babel}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
%
%************Bibliography*Definitions*******************************************
\usepackage[style=alphabetic,maxbibnames=99,sorting=anyt,firstinits=true,url=false,doi=false]{biblatex}
\renewcommand*{\newunitpunct}{\addcomma\space}
\renewcommand{\labelalphaothers}{}
\renewcommand{\labelnamepunct}{\addcomma\space}
\renewbibmacro{in:}{}
\DeclareFieldFormat*{journaltitle}{#1}
\DeclareFieldFormat*{title}{\enquote{\textsl{#1}}}
\DeclareFieldFormat*{volume}{\textbf{#1}}
\renewbibmacro*{volume+number+eid}{\printfield{volume}}
\AtEveryBibitem{\clearfield{issn}}
%\DefineBibliographyStrings{english}{references = {testbla}}
\bibliography{test.bib}
%
%
%
\begin{document}

\cite{Engelsman1973}

\printbibliography

\end{document}

with a bibtex-file generated by Mendeley

@article{Engelsman1973,
author = {Engelsman, FMR and Wiegers, GA and Jellinek, F and {Van Laar}, B},
journal = {Journal of Solid State Chemistry},
pages = {574--582},
title = {{Crystal structures and magnetic structures of some metal (I) chromium (III) sulfides and selenides}},
url = {http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022459673800180},
volume = {6},
year = {1973}
}

Biblatex would abbreviate the name of Engelsman (FMR -> F.) and Wiegers (GA -> G.) but for Jellinek and VanLaar, where only one letter is given for the first names, it would let it like this. How can I fix this, without changing each entry in Mendeley. I use bibtex as backend, because I couldn't get biber to work and I haven't found a good documentation in the net for this (passed the whole last weekend on trying to get it work).

Thanks for any suggestions.

Answer 1

As Alan Munn has commented, the punctuation for "abbreviated" single-letter first names is correctly added with biber as backend. That said, here's a hack that adds the punctuation for bibtex8:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[firstinits=true,maxnames=99,backend=bibtex8]{biblatex}

\DeclareNameFormat{first-last}{%
  \iffirstinits
    {\usebibmacro{name:first-last}{#1}{#4\adddot}{#5}{#7}}
    {\usebibmacro{name:first-last}{#1}{#3}{#5}{#7}}%
  \usebibmacro{name:andothers}}

\usepackage{filecontents}

\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@article{Engelsman1973,
author = {Engelsman, FMR and Wiegers, GA and Jellinek, F and {Van Laar}, B},
journal = {Journal of Solid State Chemistry},
pages = {574--582},
title = {{Crystal structures and magnetic structures of some metal (I) chromium (III) sulfides and selenides}},
url = {http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022459673800180},
volume = {6},
year = {1973}
}
\end{filecontents}

\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

\nocite{*}

\begin{document}

\printbibliography

\end{document}