Formatting bibliographies

You may wish to change Eplain's formatting of the bibliography, especially with respect to the fonts that are used. Therefore, Eplain provides the following control sequences:

\biblabelwidth

This control sequence represents a \dimen register, and its value is the width of the widest label in the bibliography. Although it is unlikely you will ever want to redefine it, you might want to use it if you redefine \biblabelprint, below.

\biblabelprint

This macro takes one argument, the label to print. By default, the label is put in a box of width \biblabelwidth, and is followed by an enspace. When you want to change the spacing around the labels, this is the right macro to redefine.

\biblabelcontents

This macro also takes one argument, the label to print. By default, the label is printed using the font \bblrm (below), and enclosed in brackets. When you want to change the appearance of the label, but not the spacing around it, this is the right macro to redefine.

\bblrm

The default font used for printing the bibliography.

\bblem

The font used for printing the titles and other "emphasized" material.

\bblsc

In some styles, authors' names are printed in a caps-and-small-caps font. In those cases, this font is used.

\bblnewblock

This is invoked between each of the parts of a bibliography entry. The default is to leave some extra space between the parts; you could redefine it to start each part on a new line (for example). A part is simply a main element of the entry; for example, the author is a part. (It was LaTeX that introduced the (misleading, as far as I am concerned) term `block' for this.)

\biblabelextraspace

Bibliography entries are typeset with a hanging indentation of \biblabelwidth plus this. The default is .5em, where the em width is taken from the \bblrm font. If you want to change this, you should do it inside \bblhook.

\bblhook

This is expanded before reading the .bbl file. By default, it does nothing. You could, for example, define it to set the bibliography fonts, or produce the heading for the references. Two spacing parameters must be changed inside \bblhook: \parskip, which produces extra space between the items; and \biblabelextraspace, which is described above. (By the way, \hookappend won't work with \bblhook, despite the names. Just use \def.)

If you are really desperate, you can also hand-edit the .bbl file that BibTeX produces to do anything you wish.