[Leaplist] Don't hijack my latex thread!

[Derek Konigsberg]

On Mon, 7 Dec 2009, tom foster wrote:

> Well ok, I guess you can if you want.
>
> I just spent a couple hours today getting pummeled by
> bibtex and apacite (I need the apa format).  I even went so
> far as to install biblatex.  I just don't get the syntax of
> file.bib, and I couldn't seem to refer to the right part or
> parts of it in \cite{stuff}  I did manage to get a blank
> page with "References" at the top, but soon after that I
> gave in and just wrote the references by hand.
>
> Anybody have any words of wisdom for me?

Back when I was still in college, I did plenty with LaTeX/BibTeX for 
writing research papers.  The bibtex format is basically a flat .bib file 
full of snippets that look like this:

----SNIP----
@article{ni:wire,
  author = {Michael Thaddeus Niemier and Peter M. Kogge},
  title = {Exploring and exploiting wire-level pipelining in emerging technologies},
  journal = {ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News},
  volume = {29},
  number = {2},
  year = {2001},
  issn = {0163-5964},
  pages = {166--177},
  doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/384285.379261},
  publisher = {ACM Press},
  }
----SNIP----
For the sake of this response, assume this (and plenty other) entries are 
in a file called "foo.bib"

Of course some useful research paper search engines like Citeseer will 
actually give you bibtex entries for the papers you find with them.  And 
of course the actual format includes more entry types, like article, 
inproceedings, incollection, book, misc, and so on.

Now in your actual .tex file, every time you want to cite the above 
article, you would use the following tag: "\cite{ni:wire}"
I'd even often prefix it with a "~" just to make sure it got a space 
between it and the rest of the sentence.

At the very end of my .tex file, I'd then have the following sequence of 
commands:
----SNIP----
\bibliographystyle{plain}
\bibliography{foo}
\end{document}
----SNIP----

Finally, to actually build all of this into a usable document, you need 
some sort of somewhat repetative sequence of the "latex", "bibtex", and 
"dvips"/"dvipdf" commands.  Not sure of the exact sequence.  (probably 
latex once to build the document, bibtex to do its thing, then latex again 
to fill stuff in.)

-- 
----------------------------
  Derek Konigsberg
  dkonigsberg at logicprobe.org
----------------------------

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