TeX, LaTeX and Friends

12:09 AM

Does anyone know what \BibitemShut {NoStop} does?

12:55 AM

@DavidCarlisle I spent all day on it, and after several hours, I got the 48 lines in the preamble of the .bbl, down to only 5 !! Finally, I posted the question here after so much hesitation about it not being a great question (I'm not very active on this site, so don't really know the culture):

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Q: arXiv is not word-wrapping long bibliography entries the way Overleaf and my local installation do, for precisely the same MWE

After extensive discussion with Barbara Beeton in the chat room, and later with David Carlisle in the same place, I was recommended by both to write my question here, it has just taken some hours to strip everything down to as minimal of a working example as possible, and still get the problem re...

barbara beeton

2:04 AM

@user1271772 -- Your question is just fine -- it shows that you've done your research, and the example is compilable and error-free. That said, I've just tried it out and get yet a different result (with an up-to-date installation); the authors all fit on one line and the journal name on the next, no need for any breaks. What's different, I can't say, and have no way of checking. But you're not hallucinating. (My laptop is misbehaving; I can't post on the main site.)

user1271772

2:19 AM

@barbarabeeton The result that you got, is the same as what I got on my laptop and in Overleaf (see the first screenshot in my question, all authors are in one line, just like in your case). It's arXiv that's giving something anomalous!

barbara beeton

@user1271772 -- I believe there's a slight difference: in your image, the name of the last author is hyphenated -- "Fil-ippi" -- but the spacing is certainly much better than what arXiv is producing. I hope that someone out there can figure this out. It's horrible!

@user1271772 -- I apologize! I looked again at your question on the main site, and the result (the first image) is the same. I was looking at the images at the bottom.

user1271772

@barbarabeeton Yea the images at the bottom are the ones I first showed you here in chat. Those are the ones I originally had when I submitted my paper. The ones at the top of my question were generated using the MWE (hence why your result was the same!). The MWE result is probably a bit different because I removed 43 lines from the .bbl file. That took some time: basically I commented one line at a time and re-compiled every time in between, until I got the 5 remaining lines that were absolutely

necessary to compile without errors :)

barbara beeton

2:42 AM

@user1271772 -- I've honestly never seen a .bbl file with coding like that. What does the .bib file look like for that entry, and what \bibliographystyle is used? (I think it was there in your original question, but I can't find it now.) The only package I recognize that I know is related to a biblio is natbib, and I know natbib doesn't produce any .bbl code like that. I suspect the .bst file.

user1271772

Let me try David's recommendation for how to get multi-line code in the chat (in order to paste the .bib entry):

    @article{Daday2012,
    abstract = {We employ the recently developed full configuration interaction quantum Monte Carlo (FCIQMC) method to compute the $\pi$ → $\pi$* vertical excitation energies of ethene and all-trans butadiene. These excitations have been the subject of extensive theoretical studies, and their location with respect to the corresponding absorption band maximum is the source of a long lingering debate. Here, we reliably estimate the vertical excitations of ethene and butadiene by performing FCIQMC calculations for spaces as large as 1018 and 1029 Slater determinants, re…

This is just exported directly from the Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation, via Mendeley.

\bibliographystyle{apsrev4-1}

APS is not as good as AMS ;)

barbara beeton

3:22 AM

@user1271772 -- Ignoring the "abstract" and "file" elements, this looks pretty routine. A little digging in the bibtex/bst area of the tex-live directory finds no apsrev4 files, but a couple of revtex4 files that are about double the size of the base and amscls offerings. The thing that surprises me is that they were written by Patrick Daly. They were generated from sources (.mbs files) about which I know nothing, whereas the "base" and "ams" .bst files were created "directly".

I'll do some more poking around, but tomorrow -- it's heading toward midnight, so time to tuck in.

user1271772

@barbarabeeton 11:30pm here for me too :)

Alan Munn

Somebody's in a bad mood tonight.

barbara beeton

@AlanMunn -- Yes, I noticed that. (Since my laptop is being obnoxious, I can't post on the main site, or even look at comments that aren't already shown. So I can't see what other "damage" might have been done. But I can demonstrate that it wasn't me! Even if I felt like it!) How's life locked down in Michigan?

user1271772

3:38 AM

Wasn't me either

Alan Munn

@barbarabeeton You were definitely at the top of my suspects list. :) Life goes on. I go shopping once every three weeks and we go to the barn and that's about it. I'm not optimistic about the Fall semester. Already 14 people at a local bar popular with students tested positive. I can't imagine what it will be like when more students come back.

@barbarabeeton My mum just had her 90th birthday yesterday, but she's in lockdown in Toronto. So that was a bit sad. But she's doing fine, thankfully.

user1271772

@AlanMunn I'm in Toronto (well, Waterloo.. close enough).

Alan Munn

@user1271772 I went to Waterloo my first year of university. It's been a long time though... :)

user1271772

@AlanMunn What about the rest of the years?!

Switched to McGill? What was the reason?

barbara beeton

@AlanMunn -- Oy! But students are immortal, didn't you know? (At least they think they are.) Oh, happy birthday to your mum! I hope she stays safe and has lots to keep herself interested.

Alan Munn

3:45 AM

@user1271772 I dropped out of CS/Pure math, moved to Montreal, worked for a few years as a programmer and then did linguistics at McGill. A linguist convinced me that human natural science problems were more interesting than computational problems. :)

user1271772

I think we talked here a few months ago about Chomsky and Knuth

Alan Munn

@barbarabeeton She has plenty to read especially after she raided the 7 boxes of books I shipped to her house in 1992 that I never retrieved. :)

barbara beeton

@AlanMunn -- Gad! Comp Sci didn't even exist when I was an undergrad. The Appl Math department had a computer (it used biquinary arithmetic and programs had to take into account the rotational delay of the memory drum0

Alan Munn

@user1271772 Ah so we did. You really ought to get a more memorable user name. :)

barbara beeton

(cont'd) but the university president said "There are already three math departments. NO we can't have a fourth." (The third was History of math.) So I ended up in linguistics too, but largely because a pure math professor didn't like applied mathematicians, and liked female mathematicians even less. But it turned out well, I think. Now I get to play in the TeX sandbox.

Alan Munn

3:56 AM

@barbarabeeton One of my former profs at McGill ended up as a linguist for similar reasons: the math dept at UPenn wouldn't accept women.

barbara beeton

@AlanMunn -- The crazy thing is, before WWII, Brown awarded more PhDs to women in Appl Math than all but one other school in the U.S. (I think it might have been Chicago or Berkeley.) And if I had managed to graduate, I would have been the first ScB. (The department chair was terribly sad when I told him I was decamping.)

Alan Munn

@barbarabeeton So things changed a lot after the war? Was this because of the GI bill?

barbara beeton

@AlanMunn -- That's an interesting question. It might have had some effect, but Pembroke, the former women's college at Brown, wasn't really affected, and most of the "technical" departments (engineering, physics, geology) didn't discourage women, as far as I know. My guess is that women just didn't apply as readily, once the men came home.

Alan Munn

4:12 AM

@barbarabeeton I see.