[OS X TeX] biblatex / TeXShop questions

[Scot Mcphee]

On 02/01/2013, at 00:54 , Simon Spiegel <simon at simifilm.ch> wrote:

> 
> On 01.01.2013, at 14:01, Scot Mcphee <scot.mcphee at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> 2.
>> I am using the style "authoryear-comp" as that is pretty close to the house style for my PhD. However one thing it does do that looks wrong to me is the citation is 'Author YYYY' but the bibliographical entry is 'Author, Firstname. (YYYY). ...'. I know our house style rules are on the lines that if the year is in brackets in the citations, it should be in the biblio, and vice-versa. How do I control that? Do I need to write a custom style?
> 
> Are you sure these are the rules, because the way you describe doesn't make much sense to me. Normally you either have the year in the bibliography in brackets or you don't. But this normally doesn't depend directly on the in-text citation. It's quite common to have both varieties in a text depending on the situation. For example you would write "As Doe (1998) shows …" but you would use (Doe 1998) to give the source of a verbal citation.
> 
> But anyway, you might have a look at my style biblatex-fiwi which I wrote for humanities (film/media studies especially). Its documentation is only in German at the moment, but most things should be quite self-explanatory from the examples. Judging from your description it might fit your needs better than author-comp.


Simon, 

Thanks heaps for that. I will have a look at your biblatex-fiwi. My wife is actually a film/tv scholar (actually a lecturer). Maybe I will try to get her to use LaTeX too ... (ha! fat chance).

The house rules say that we only use the Biblio style "Author, Firstname (YEAR) ..." if we use the citation style "Author (YEAR)". However, because I have use ancient text citations as well, which is variant on the text I am referring to and how I am referring to it, "Author (YEAR): page" looks weird, so I use "Author YEAR: page". In which case the guide  "suggests" the biblio style is "Author, Firstname. YEAR. ..." The mixed ancient/modern citation styles also means they go into footnotes, not inline. I am just going to keep the ancient sources all manual citation, as the bibliography is very specialised as well.

What happens around here is the Graduate School gets in a complete tizz about these things come thesis submission time, because really they've got nothing better to do other than play at being petty bureaucrats. (I will note that they supply a Word .dot "template", but no LaTeX .cls, I have had to start writing one myself after I trawled the maths faculty website hoping they'd written one but come up with nothing).

Anyway thanks again for you suggestions.

scot.