Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Turabian, Chicago and LaTeX

I'm trying to finish my thesis for my MATh from the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and the most annoying part of the work is getting the thing into the Turabian-modified "Chicago" format. I typeset all my writing using LaTeX, and so I looked around for some software that would do everything semi-automatically for me.


The answer comes in two parts. First, some folks at the University of Notre Dame have produced a class file for their PhD dissertations which happens to get most everything right. So I started there.


The main problem with the nddiss2e class is that it uses natbib's numbered bibliography format. So I had to modify nddiss2e.cls to use jurabib instead. Here are the relevant parameters:


\RequirePackage[%
oxford,%
titleformat={italic,commasep},%
authorformat=and,%
commabeforerest,%
citefull=first,%
ibidem=nostrict,%
bibformat=ibidem,
pages=format]{jurabib}
\jbuseidemhrule
\bibliographystyle{jox}


Here, "oxford" gets the bibliographical formatting correct. "citefull" makes it so the first citation in the thesis of each work gets a full bibliographic entry in the footnote. "ibidem=nostrict" takes care of all the "ibid"s. And "jbuseidemhrule" formats repeated author names with rules in the bibliography. I think there may be a few details which don't quite match perfectly, but they seem to be minor enough not to matter. I hope.

4 Comments:

Blogger veganfreak said...

thanks for this tip..using your parameters there, I was able to break through my brain freeze trying to get chicago-like citations working.

I prepared my dissertation using LyX and some custom class files, and it worked brilliantly (the references, though, used an APA style, which is a bit easier to implement). When everyone else was fighting with Word to get things to format correctly, I was printing a high-quality postscript file ;)

Good luck with your work, and thanks!

12:06 PM, July 01, 2006  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thank you. This worked great.

3:31 PM, October 31, 2006  
Blogger Jesse said...

I just found this and the link to the template appears to be broken. would it be possible for you to send me a copy of that file? (this is the name of my gmail account if email is best for you)

thanks,
-Jesse

8:35 PM, November 12, 2007  
Blogger Jesse said...

oops, you can't see my user ID... jesse.shaver and that is a gmail.com adress...

8:36 PM, November 12, 2007  

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