bibtex & capitalization

It seems that most of the default bibtex styles convert all non-first letters in titles to lowercase. This is problematic, since of course many papers have proper nouns (e.g. locations, species, named concepts) in their titles! Rather than go through and attach braces "{}" around all letters that need capitalization preserved, it makes more sense to edit the bibtex style file (*.bst) to preserve the title:

If you prefer to edit the bibtex style (.bst) rather than the bibliography (.bib), you can search for occurences of change.case$ in it. This is the function that capitalizes or title-izes fields that are not people names.

Typically, for the title field, you should find something like title "t" change.case$. Since you want the title unmodified, replace that by just title.

All I needed to do was copy the bibtex style file into the local folder with my tex document, edit it, and re-compile. Voila!

From here.

Streamlining the workflow

Yes, TexShop's keyboard-command typesetting is nice, but I couldn't figure out a way to get it to run through the whole 4-step process (latex/bibtex/latex/latex) for making a file with cited references with one keystroke.

Lyx will do the whole compilation in one command, but its interface doesn't allow me to edit just the latex code, instead forcing me to use some weird WYSIWYM viewing mode.

Luckily, I found some scripts that will integrate MacTex and TextWrangler.

I still needed a single keystroke full-compile-and-view command though, so I glued the "Full document compilation" and "Show result" scripts together and assigned it a keyboard shortcut (Window->Palettes->Scripts->Set Key...).

I also needed to edit the shell script to use Preview instead of Skim. Maybe this means I should play around with Skim a bit?

Anyway, this now allows me to select a bunch (or all) of references in Papers, export to bibtex, and cite them easily (assuming that the metadata in Papers is correct).