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<title>UK TeX FAQ -- question label custbib</title>
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<h3>Creating a bibliography style</h3>
<p/>It <em>is</em> possible to write your own: the standard bibliography
styles are distributed in a form with many comments, and there is a description
of the language in the BibTeX distribution (see 
<a href="FAQ-BibTeXing.html">BibTeX documentation</a>).
However, it must be admitted that the language in which BibTeX
styles are written is pretty obscure, and one would not recommend
anyone who&#8217;s not a confident programmer to write their own, though
minor changes to an existing style may be within the grasp of many.
<p/>If your style isn&#8217;t too &#8216;far out&#8217;, you can probably generate it by
using the facilities of the <i>custom-bib</i> bundle.  This
contains a file <i>makebst.tex</i>, which runs you through a text menu
to produce a file of instructions, with which you can generate your
own <code>.bst</code> file.  This technique doesn&#8217;t offer entirely new styles
of document, but the system&#8217;s &#8220;master BibTeX styles&#8221; already
offer significantly more than the BibTeX standard set.
<p/>An alternative, which is increassingly often recommended, to use
<a href="FAQ-biblatex.html"><i>biblatex</i></a>.  <i>Biblatex</i> offers
many hooks for adjusting the format of the output of your &#8216;basic&#8217;
BibTeX style, and a collection of &#8216;contributed&#8217; styles have also
started to appear.
<dl>
<dt><tt><i>biblatex.sty</i></tt><dd><a href="http://mirror.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/biblatex.zip">macros/latex/contrib/biblatex</a> (or <a href="http://mirror.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/biblatex/">browse the directory</a>); <a href="http://mirror.ctan.org/help/Catalogue/entries/biblatex.html">catalogue entry</a>
<dt><tt><i>biblatex contributed styles</i></tt><dd><a href="http://mirror.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/biblatex-contrib">macros/latex/contrib/biblatex-contrib</a>
<dt><tt><i>BibTeX documentation</i></tt><dd><a href="http://mirror.ctan.org/biblio/bibtex/base.zip">biblio/bibtex/base</a> (or <a href="http://mirror.ctan.org/biblio/bibtex/base/">browse the directory</a>); <a href="http://mirror.ctan.org/help/Catalogue/entries/bibtex.html">catalogue entry</a>
<dt><tt><i>makebst.tex</i></tt><dd>Distributed with <a href="http://mirror.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/custom-bib.zip">macros/latex/contrib/custom-bib</a> (or <a href="http://mirror.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/custom-bib/">browse the directory</a>); <a href="http://mirror.ctan.org/help/Catalogue/entries/custom-bib.html">catalogue entry</a>
</dl>
<p/><p>This question on the Web: <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=custbib">http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=custbib</a>
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