Missing URL in BibTex Bibliography

This is some stupid thing that cost me several hours of tinkering tonight. By default, URLs and last access time/date are not part of any style in LaTeX. How freaking ancient is that?!!?!

So heres a fix. Its been tested under OS X 10.5, so it should work for anyone running Linux too.

  1. Download urlbst from http://nxg.me.uk/dist/urlbst/. For me the current version is 0.6.
  2. Extract the archive anywhere, just so happened to be my Downloads folder.
  3. Open a terminal window, and navigate to the newly created directly. For me it was ~/Downloads/urlbst-0.6/
  4. Run ‘./configure’ without the ‘ and ‘
  5. I have to use the acm bibliography style, so i will be playing around with acm.bst
  6. Run ’sudo mv /usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf-dist/bibtex/bst/base/acm.bst /usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf-dist/bibtex/bst/base/oldacm.bst’. This moves the original style file to a safe place.
  7. Run ‘./urlbst /usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf-dist/bibtex/bst/base/acm.bst newacm.bst’. This adds the URL information to the style.
  8. Run ’sudo cp newacm.bst /usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf-dist/bibtex/bst/base/acm.bst. This moves the new style file to a directly where LaTeX can find it.

Now all your webpages and sources with online references & cite dates will look right! Woot! Sleepy time now!!!

3 Comments

  1. Fred:

    Thanks for the link to Urlbst - save me a big headache!

  2. Adam:

    Also, including the package url improves to rendering of urls in general. The code to do so is:

    \usepackage{url}

    Place it before \begin{document} and you’re all set!

  3. Patrick:

    Thanks! That was exactly what I was looking for and it saved me the hours you lost. So thanks again for the great work!

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