Produce a hyperlinked DOI?

Question

Friends,

I'm trying to write a command that prints appropriately hyperlinked DOIs for a bibliography system. Here was my first attempt

\newcommand{\formatdoi}[1]{\href{http://dx.doi.org/#1}{#1}}

This works very well for most DOIs. However, some DOIs have pesky non-LaTeX-friendly characters in them like _. It turns out that if you butcher the DOI by transforming the _ to a \_, then everything works! (Even the LINK in the \href is correct.)

I'm not happy with this solution, because it means that we have to include butchered DOIs in our BibTeX database, which could confuse other users. I would like a solution that permits me to use legitimate DOIs as input.

Well, I just learned about the \detokenize command. With this, I can update the command above to

\newcommand{\formatdoi}[1]{\href{http://dx.doi.org/\detokenize{#1}}{#1}}

which works very well for the hyperlink part; however, underscores naturally confuse typesetting of the second argument. Is there a simple solution? I had thought to use the verbatim environment here, but it does not seem to be robust enough to be used in a function this way.

Any help much appreciated. A few more constraints:

I would like to minimize the number (and complexity) of included packages since this all takes place inside a style file for a journal.
It would be good enough for a small piece of code that transformed every _ to a \_; is such a thing easy to come by?

All the best, Alex

Why not adding \detokenize also to the second part? Can you give an example of a problematic DOI? — egreg, Mar 30 '12 at 00:10
Dear egreg, If I typeset \detokenize{10.1007/978-3-540-70575-8_10} in regular paragraph mode, the _ turns into a superscript dot. I'm using \usepackage{mathptmx} to set the fonts in this case. — acr, Mar 30 '12 at 01:04
Dear Speravir, No--I'll look into it. Thanks for the pointer. — acr, Mar 30 '12 at 11:37
Dear Speravir, Hey--uri looks good! Unlike the doi package, it seems that you can make calls to uri from other macros, which I need. This solves the major part of the problem--thanks! My remaining issue is that I would like to avoid changing the font--uri typesets in monospace and I would like to maintain the font of the narrative. Thanks again! If you turn this into an "answer," I can give you credit for the solution. — acr, Mar 30 '12 at 12:20
See my answer. But let me write some remarks, too: First, please begin all comments, that are not for the original questioner or the one, who provided the answer you commented to, with @Username (as did Harish to inform you). Only then this user gets notified. Second, most of the information you’ve put in your comments should have given by you at first in the question already. In most cases it is advisably to put a full minimal (not) working example (short MWE) into the question, in your case you should have given an example bib entry, too. — Speravir, Apr 02 '12 at 23:43
Wiley has some strange DOIs, in addition to underscores, you might also check out DOIs like this one: 10.1002/(SICI)1099-114X(199904)23:5%3C415::AID-ER489%3E3.0.CO;2-7 — matth, Apr 03 '12 at 09:50

score 18 · Answer 1 · 2012-03-30T05:39:09.900

18

In my previous answer, there was some confusion between - and _. Well, here is a solution that takes _ as well. I used the doi package.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{doi}
\usepackage{hyperref}
\begin{document}
\renewcommand\doitext{Doi: }
\doi{10.1007/978-3-540-70575-8_10}
\end{document}

enter image description here

Hope this will be useful.

edited Mar 30 '12 at 05:39

answered Mar 30 '12 at 00:24

Dear Harish, Thanks for your response. However, this doesn't seem to work with DOIs that contain underscores, like 10.1007/978-3-540-70575-8_10 . Perhaps I am misunderstanding your suggestion? – acr Mar 30 '12 at 01:25
@AlexanderRussell Sorry for the confusion earlier. I have updated the answer. Hope it will be useful. – Mar 30 '12 at 05:40
Dear Harish, The doi package looks great; I'm embarrassed that I didn't find it by a web search. However, it seems that you cannot use the \doi command inside another macro. Is my situation hopeless? – acr Mar 30 '12 at 11:36
I don't understand. Why you want to use it inside another macro? http://dx.doi.org/ is automatically added by the package itself. You have to just type the numbers. – Mar 30 '12 at 11:42
Dear Harish, In my application, the DOI body is passed to my code after it is extracted from a bibliography record. It could be possible to rewrite the bibliography-handling code, but I would like to avoid that if I can. – acr Mar 30 '12 at 12:16
Dear All, If you are looking for an alternate answer to this question, see Speravir's comment to the original post. – acr Mar 30 '12 at 14:07

score 8 · Accepted Answer · edited Jul 18 '17 at 09:20

Beside Harish’s solution with doi you can use the package uri, which uses facilities of the package url to define some commands, one of them is \doi again.

But if you want to keep the font family, you need to define this command yourself. I show you both. Comment out the line with \usepackage{uri} and remove the comment sign before \DeclareUrlCommand to see the effects.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{hyperref} % loads package "url", provides linking facilities
\usepackage[doipre={DOI:~}]{uri} % loads "url", if not already loaded
%\DeclareUrlCommand\doi{\def\UrlLeft##1\UrlRight{DOI\nobreakspace\href{http://dx.doi.org/##1}{##1}}\urlstyle{rm}} % works only, if "url" is loaded, but not "uri"
\begin{document}
\doi{10.1007/978-3-540-70575-8_10}\\
\doi{10.1002/(SICI)1099-114X(199904)23:5%3C415::AID-ER489%3E3.0.CO;2-7}
\end{document}

Note, that you can’t change the font family with the options for uri (‘doipre’ and ‘doipost’) – at least here at me the computer freezed. The syntaxes for \DeclareUrlCommand and \urlstyle are described in the documentation for url.

Update: Added a even more weird DOI given by matth in comments.

Produce a hyperlinked DOI?

2 Answers2

Linked