LaTeX references made easy

Posted on October 8, 2007 
Filed Under Typography

I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to find this. Latex is my typesetting software of choice but I’ve always found references to be a pain. First you’ve got to convert your existing EndNote references into BibTeX. Then you need to tweak that file making sure all the ampersands, double-quotes and other marks are TeX-friendly and finally you need to find a style file that makes the whole thing display the way you want to. (I’m sure by this point people are thinking why even bother…)

Anyway I’ve found two things recently which make references in LaTeX much easier. They would have been really useful about a year ago when I was writing my thesis but better late than never.

  1. The LaTeX Bibliography Styles Database is just that: a database of bibliography styles. It’s mainly useful for finding the right style for a particular journal (as opposed to for reports etc).
  2. Even better is the custom-bib package. Once installed, just run latex makebst and answer a series of questions about how you want things formatted. It then automatically creates the .bst style file which, even if you have to make a few changes, is a heck of a lot easier than starting from scratch. It’s worth it just for the “make titles display as entered” feature alone (many BibTeX styles default to sentence case for titles, which is a pain if you want something like “A history of London” rather than “A history of london”).

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