Quick reference lists

[Ian Fantom]

I'm trying to avoid formatting hundreds of references with a
bibliographic tool. They are taken from a word processed document. I
don't know how long that would take, but I don't want to be drawn down a
rabbit hole.

I've created lists according to the chapters they refer to, and inserted
these in \backmatter, following Appendixes. But whereas I want
Appendixes to be numbered sequentially (This is working), I want
References lists to be numbered by the chapters they refer to. I've
inserted each Reference list as a section in the chapter References.

I achieve this by using:

\renewcommand{\thesection}{\ref{ch:label}}
\section[Title abbreviated]{Ch. ch:label \ref{Title}}

This gives:

1 Title1

2 Title2

etc

Thus the second appendix appears in the Table of Contents as:

References

1 Title 1 abbreviated

2 Title 2 abbreviated

etc.

Everything works fine EXCEPT that the page headings on odd-numbered
pages appear as:

??. Title 1 abbreviated        page no

??. Title 2 abbreviated        page no

etc.

I've tried compiling both with Xelatex and pdflatex, and get the same
result.

Any ideas on how to remove the '??.' or to replace it by the chapter
number referred to?

I can put the chapter number in the Title (but not the abbreviated
title), just removing the '??.' would be fine.

Regards,

Ian

[Peter Flynn]

On 06/11/2024 12:44, Ian Fantom wrote:
> I'm trying to avoid formatting hundreds of references with a
> bibliographic tool. They are taken from a word processed document.

I'm sorry to hear this. It's a well-known and long-established problem,
even if the references are separated (eg para or list item) and even if
the titles are italicised or quoted correctly. I know of at least two
university-level (Comp Sci) projects that have made a hard attempt to
fix this, and eventually failed and stopped, realising the impossibility
of turning a hamburger back into a cow.

> I don't know how long that would take, but I don't want to be drawn
> down a rabbit hole.

There are several ways to do it:

1. Extract the text by some means and edit the entire thing into BiBTeX
by hand.

2. Send it all to one of the excellent Pacific Rim companies who use
highly qualified PhDs to do the job for you. Just name the output format.

IFF the quality and consistency is good:

3. Word is just a zip file containing an XML document. Its not hard to
write a little XSLT script which you can run with (eg) Saxon to extract
the paragraphs (and in Word, *everything* except tables is a pararaph),
and do some heuristics on inspection about maintaining things like
italic and bold. The output can be a BiBTeX file or another XML format
or whatever you need.

4. If you cannot access the internal XML, you should consider iXML
("invisible" XML: see https://invisiblexml.org/) which lets you specify
patterns in text or data which *imply* markup (line-breaks, spacing,
punctuation, etc). An iXML processor can then apply those patterns and
create actual XML which can subsequently be reprocessed as in [3] above
to make some kind of sense.

5. XML tools like Saxon and Omnimark also have pattern-matching syntax
which is probably capable of doing the same as [4] above.

Ultimately you need to get the output into BiBTeX format to make any
kind of formatting sense out of it.

> I've created lists according to the chapters they refer to, and
> inserted these in \backmatter, following Appendixes. But whereas I
> want Appendixes to be numbered sequentially (This is working), I want
> References lists to be numbered by the chapters they refer to.

This seems to be a completely different question, or did I miss something.

> I've inserted each Reference list as a section in the chapter
> References.

Consider using the multibib package to handle this.

> I achieve this by using:

[...]

> Everything works fine EXCEPT that the page headings on odd-numbered
> pages appear as:

Are you using the fancyhdr package? And a two-sided setting?

> I've tried compiling both with Xelatex and pdflatex, and get the same
> result.

This would have nothing to do with the processor: both will create
identical output (modulo the exceptions we discussed earlier about
versions of fonts affecting line-lengths; but that is a rare outlier).

> Any ideas on how to remove the '??.' or to replace it by the chapter
> number referred to?

I'd need to see a minimal example. Something about the reference is missing.

I'm unclear what this has to do with the bibliographies.

Peter