Comments on: LaTeX: the pain, the pleasure

By: Brett Holman

Brett Holman — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 23:56:37 +0000

Yes, \footcite is a real timesaver! But it’s not perfect, I’ve found — it doesn’t always know when it should put in an ibid. Particularly if you mix \footcites with normal \footnotes + \cites (for example, if you have substantive footnotes as well). With the final copy of my thesis I found myself having to go through and replace some \footcites with manual ‘Ibid.’s. But not many, and overall it prevented far more suffering than it caused.

By: rohan

rohan — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 02:04:29 +0000

Here’s yet another humanities student grateful for your post! jurabib is a godsend. i’d previously hacked together a bibstyle from natbib for my uni work but it was pretty lame, jurabib is exactly what i wanted!

also, loving \footcite — i hate referencing harvard style and this has saved me a long time trying to figure out how to do footnotes with ibid rules etc.

By: Brett Holman

Brett Holman — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 12:32:29 +0000

Glad to be of some assistance! I found some limitations with citations too, though ultimately I managed to avoid hacking the .bbl file. I didn’t put newspapers citations in with bibtex, I put them all in by hand. But as I then wanted a list in the bibliography of newspapers consulted, I put in a \nocite for each one, which pointed to an article which only had the journal name and a key. For theses, there are phdthesis and mastersthesis bibtex types, but I discarded those and used unpublished instead, with the university, type etc in a note (mainly because I also had to add a postgraduate diploma thesis, just to be difficult). And multivolume works are possible with books – there’s a volume field for that, though maybe you can’t get that to format properly for JHRA. I know that for Oxford at least, jurabib only uses the volume number for the (initial) full cite, so subsequent cites can be confusing. Maybe the shorttitle field would be the way around that, though I managed to get away without having to deal with that particular problem.

By: Ruth

Ruth — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 20:16:11 +0000

Just found this blog, and am a linguist (student of languages, *not* of linguistics) writing my thesis in LaTeX and having fun with the MHRA style… I’m using jurabib and jmhra.bst I think, but there are some categories which are a *pain*… namely, works that have no editor or publisher (like 17th-C newspapers), theses, and multi-volume works. This is perhaps particularly true as I don’t have bibdesk (I’m using pybliographic, since I’m on a Linux system). As I’m nearing hand-in, I’m happy plodding along, and editing the .bbl file when I get there, but thanks for all the references in this – I’ll be following some of them up :)

By: Brett Holman

Brett Holman — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 04:39:39 +0000

Thanks, Piero. Coincidentally, I've just put up a post about a new blog all about LaTeX from a humanities perspective. So the word is spreading!

By: Airminded · LaTeX for Humans

Airminded · LaTeX for Humans — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 04:17:21 +0000

[...] than Word or something equally maladapted. Since it’s a subject which I’ve written on several times before, and since switching is not easy, despite the advantages (sorry Sarah!), I’m [...]

By: Piero Faustini

Piero Faustini — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 10:11:07 +0000

Hello, just found this blog….
I just want to give some advices to historian and so on based on my experience.
I’m writing a PhD dissertation in history of italian opera with LyX (which is a WYSIWYM Word-like front-end for LaTeX) with BibLaTeX package (as Brett pointed out) which is AWESOME. I’m a happy musicologist, right now.
Try both LyX (version 1.6 is coming out and seems to be much better than actual 1.5.6) and BibLaTeX (fully developing), and spread the LaTeX verb in the humanist world!

By: Why use LaTeX? « LaTeX for Humans

Why use LaTeX? « LaTeX for Humans — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 21:04:05 +0000

[...] http://airminded.org/2005/11/18/latex-the-pain-the-pleasure/ Blogroll [...]

By: Brett Holman

Brett Holman — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 08:46:52 +0000

Hi Sarah!

Unfortunately (for you — may be fortunate for me!) I don’t use MHRA so I’m not sure how the best way to do it is. Have you looked at biblatex? It’s what all the smart kids are using these days (I still use jurabib, which isn’t being maintained any more). The trouble is that the learning curve may be a bit steep for a new LaTeX user. I’ve been meaning to check it out myself …

Newspapers — hmm, I do cite a lot of newspapers myself but I must confess I just do them by hand (there’s so many of them that it’s paradoxically almost easier that way). You can set up a new type (eg ‘newspaper’) by going into BibDesk Preferences, Fields, and then Custom BibTeX Types and Fields. But of course, unless the bibliographystyle you are using knows about the new type, it won’t be able to do anything with it. But that is something that you could presumably do in biblatex.

Sorry, I don’t think this is very helpful …

By: Sarah Whitfield

Sarah Whitfield — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 16:59:36 +0000

also while I’m at it – have you had any luck with newspapers and bibdesk? They don’t seem to work together, never mind archive material.