[OS X TeX] Modifying bst files

[Maarten Sneep]

On 21 okt 2004, at 23:38, Denis Chabot wrote:

> For instance references in text are like (Chabot, 2004) or (Claireaux 
> and Couturier, 2004). I need to remove the comma  between the name of 
> the last author and the date.

This is not done by the bst file, afaik. Have a look at natbib for this.

> I tried (but did not explore) makebst, but all questions about authors 
> and punctuation seemed to be about the formatted bibliography, not the 
> in text citations. Maybe I did this too quickly. There were other 
> problems as well, all questions about editors presented by with 
> variants of "editor" with or without punctuation or parentheses. For 
> that journal I don't want the word editor after the editor(s)' names, 
> but I need "Edited by" before their names!

bst files are _all_ about the formatted bibliography, and _never_ 
influence the citations themselves (although obviously they must have 
some indication as to whether the bibliography is numerical or 
author-year).

For changing the citations themselves, I'd recommend natbib. It is by 
the same author as makebst (so the two work well together), it is 
already installed (what isn't ;) I think you need to spend some time 
with makebst (make sure to save the dbj file, as that allows you to 
make quick changes and re-generate the bst file itself). Also have a 
good read through the documentation of natbib, I think the combination 
answers all your questions.

> I would really appreciate if somebody could show me (off list if it is 
> long) how to edit a bst file such as apalike or make a new one with 
> makebst which would meet the above requirements.

You do _not_ want to put your mind in reverse gear to understand a bst 
file well enough in order to make changes. It is a post-fix language, 
which rather literarily means you have to think backwards.

makebst isn't too bad, the "edited by" is in there, but you may only 
figure out how to get it _after_ you've run the complete program. 
Change the generated .dbj file and try again. The in-text stuff can 
easily be done with natbib.

Maarten

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