unfill my hbox

May 24, 2009 4:31 PM

LaTeX/BibTeX-filter: How can I keep long citations from overruning the line when the references are by names and year (apalike)?

I'm preparing a document which needs to use citations like the ones that apalike produces (but I am not married to apalike.bst specifically if another .bst'll do it), and I'm running into HELLA FRUSTRATING overfull hbox issues when I have long/multiple citations (in the text, not in the bibliography). It looks like ass: not acceptable.

I've gotten rid of the nonbreaking space (~) before the cite; I've tried compiling multiple times post-bibtex to give it a chance to sort itself out, I've tried apasoft.bst... all with the same results. It's not willing to break the line mid-reference.

Is there a way I can tell it that it's ok to break the line mid-reference?

Help.

posted by Westringia F. to computers & internet (3 comments total)

I think if you use the natbib package it will do this for you. (At least, this is the only package of this type I am using, and my setup is happy to put linebreaks in long citations; I can't find hard confirmation in natbib's manual though. You probably want to be using natbib anyways.) In general, bst files are only about the bibliography at the end of the document, not citations in the text, so I don't think switching bst files will help you here.
posted by advil at 4:58 PM on May 24

I just dumped a lot of citations in a single paragraph in my dissertation (formatted with LaTeX, BibTeX, and natbib), and it was happy to but line breaks in citations, including in my (very unusual) surname.

It's hard to know this this will help in your situation, but do you know about \sloppy? It tells LaTeX, "No, dammit, when I said 'justified' I didn't mean 'go ahead and let stuff hang into the margins'."
posted by The Tensor at 5:02 PM on May 24

Thanks for sloppy, The Tensor. The sloppypar environment seems to be a workable (albeit manual) solution for me for now.
posted by Westringia F. at 5:21 PM on May 24