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The best way to built a bibliographic style seems to rely on the use of makebst. However, most likely, you can make a formatting mistake in choosing among the numerous options that you need to set. But several posts on the forum tell that editing the .dbj file by any editor it is possible to make some adjustments to obtain the result you were looking for following a trial-and-error procedure. I tried all this. Unfortunately, the .dbj file I got seems to contain only a list of options but not the choice that I made during the generation of the .bst. As example, I report here the line which seems related to the date format about the year:

%DATE FORMAT (if author-year citations)% %: (def) Year plain yr-par,%: Year in parentheses% yr-brk,%: Year in brackets% yr-col,%: Year preceded by colon% yr-per,%: Year preceded by period% yr-com,%: Date preceded by comma% yr-blk,%: Year preceded by space%

But where is the choice I made so that I could modify it an produce an other .bst from this modified .bdj? Many thanks.

umby
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1 Answers1

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The .bdj file is a TeX file, so all lines starting with % are comments. makebst uses this to list all possible options and comment not chosen options by adding a % in the first column, while lines of the chosen options start with a . So e.g.

%DATE FORMAT (if author-year citations)
% %: (def) Year plain
  yr-par,%: Year in parentheses
% yr-brk,%: Year in brackets
% yr-col,%: Year preceded by colon
% yr-per,%: Year preceded by period
% yr-com,%: Date preceded by comma
% yr-blk,%: Year preceded by space

has a space at the beginning of the line yr-par,%: Year in parentheses, so you chose "Year in parentheses".

If you want to change this, replace the first space in the currently selected line with a % and the % in the newly selected line with . E.g. to select "Year in brackets", you would change the block to

%DATE FORMAT (if author-year citations)
% %: (def) Year plain
% yr-par,%: Year in parentheses
  yr-brk,%: Year in brackets
% yr-col,%: Year preceded by colon
% yr-per,%: Year preceded by period
% yr-com,%: Date preceded by comma
% yr-blk,%: Year preceded by space
Marcel Krüger
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