[Tex/LaTex] Bad formatting using URLs in bibtex

bibliographiesbibtexurls

Is there a better way to include URLs in bibtex which result in a fine formatting? At the moment I do the following:

@misc{jvmti,
  author        = {Oracle},
  title         = {{JVM TI Reference}},
  howpublished  = {WWW page},
  year          = {2007},
  url           = {http://download.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/platform/jvmti/jvmti.html},
  note          = {\url{http://download.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/platform/jvmti/jvmti.html}},
  abstract      = {},
}

This results in this very long URL and above are all the rest of information but stretched over the whole line with a lot of white spaces due to justification.

Best Answer

I've had the same problem with URLs, the way I fixed it was adding the following commands to my preamble:

\usepackage{etoolbox}
\apptocmd{\thebibliography}{\raggedright}{}{}

Which tells LaTeX it's ok to have lines that don't span the whole text width in the bibliography.

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] URLs break compilation

Since you use hyperref, you don't need to load the url package. After loading hyperref, you could redefine \harvardurl:

\renewcommand{\harvardurl}[1]{\textbf{URL:} \url{#1}}

Orignally, natbib defines it by

\newcommand\harvardurl[1]{\textbf{URL:} \textit{#1}}

This definition doesn't work with underscores in the argument. \url fixes it. If you would like to have italic urls, you could achieve that for example by

\renewcommand*{\UrlFont}{\itshape}

[Tex/LaTex] Bibliography and URLs in references

I'm assuming that you've also loaded the hyperref package. Then, instead of specifying

webpage={http://xxx.xxx.xxx...../}

you could state

webpage={\href{http://xxx.xxx.xxx...../}{URL}}

and correspondingly simplify the format.webpage and bbl.availableat BibTeX functions.

Alternatively, if you don't want to change the content of the webpage field, you could rewrite one or both of these BibTeX functions to insert the URL provided by the webpage field inside the first argument of the \href function and specify URL as the second argument of \href. Looking at your code, I would guess that (i) you needn't invoke the bbl.availableat function at all and (ii) you may want to replace the string

" \url{" * swap$ *  "}"

in the format.webpage function with

" \href{" * swap$ *  "}{URL}"

Note that I haven't been able to try this out fully because you haven't provided sufficiently many details about your custom .bst file.

Addendum to follow up on the OP's additional information: Please try the following form of the BibTeX function format.webpage:

FUNCTION {format.webpage}
{ webpage empty$
    { "" }
    { new.block " \href{" webpage * "}{URL}" * }
  if$
}

where the content of the webpage field should be a URL, e.g., http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2012ApJ...751L..34V. Finally -- and you may already have done so, but I'll mention it for the sake of completeness -- be sure to include in your format.article function a line such as

format.webpage output

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] URLs break compilation

[Tex/LaTex] Bibliography and URLs in references

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