42

I have a reference entry in the bibliography that appears as follows:

[50] AB MySQL.    MySQL:  The  world's  most  popular  open  source  database,
     http://www.mysql.com/, 2005.

How to prevent auto-justification for specific references?

lockstep
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Bilal Sheikh
  • 523
  • 6
    You could specify your URLs using the url package. It does a very good job in breaking URLs at the text block edge. I'm not sure whether this what you're after. Or are you looking for a "ragged right" alignment? – Werner Jan 15 '12 at 04:29
  • Thanks for the url package info, however, as you guessed, I am looking for left-aligning the text in this case. – Bilal Sheikh Jan 15 '12 at 05:14
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    You could just add \raggedright (left-aligned with no hyphenation on the right) before \bibliography{...} (or \printbibliography if you're using biblatex). – Werner Jan 15 '12 at 05:53
  • 5
    With biblatex, you could use \renewcommand*{\bibfont}{\raggedright}. – lockstep Jan 15 '12 at 08:44
  • 2
    Please provide a minimal example. Nobody knows what you're doing, let alone answer your question. –  Jan 15 '12 at 09:34

1 Answers1

48

To typeset the whole bibliography \raggedright, do one of the following:

1) If you're using a manually created thebibliography environment, add \raggedright at the beginning of the environment:

\begin{thebibliography}{9}
\raggedright

\bibitem{test} A bibitem.
\end{thebibliography}

2) If you create your bibliography with BibTeX, but without the help of the natbib or the biblatex package, enclose \bibliography{<mybib>} within a group and add \raggedright inside the group:

\begingroup
\raggedright

\bibliography{<mybib>}
\endgroup

3) If you're using either natbib or biblatex, simply redefine \bibfont:

\renewcommand*{\bibfont}{\raggedright}

If you really, really want to typeset only specific references \raggedright (which is rather inconsistent), you could trick biblatex into doing so by (ab)using the execute and addendum fields of the respective entries:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{biblatex}

\usepackage{lipsum}

\usepackage{filecontents}

\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@misc{A01,
  author = {Author, A.},
  year = {2001},
  title = {Alpha -- \lipsum*[1]},
}
@misc{B02,
  execute ={\raggedright},
  addendum = {\par\vspace{-\baselineskip}\nopunct},
  author = {Buthor, B.},
  year = {2002},
  title = {Bravo -- \lipsum*[1]},
}
@misc{C03,
  author = {Cuthor, C.},
  year = {2003},
  title = {Charlie -- \lipsum*[1]},
}
\end{filecontents}

\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

\nocite{*}

\begin{document}

\printbibliography

\end{document}

enter image description here

lockstep
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