How to customize .bst files

Question

as I'm trying to make citations according to norm ISO 690-2 I faced "decapitalisation" of BibTeX entries, see: BibTeX loses capitals when creating bbl file. That was for plain style.

Now I switched to different style but I'd like to change a bit it's appereance.

1. List item

   I'd like to have enumerated list instead of [Name(year)] notation.

2. I'd like to have references in upper index.

For 2, I created command \citujas \raisebox{1ex}{\footnotesize\cite{#1}} but it forced errors when used in captions.

Thanks for any approach or link to .bst manual, I've tried to find some hints, but it took me only to makebst.

Answer 1

I am working on ISO 690 style for biblatex, see http://github.com/michal-h21/biblatex-iso690 it is in something like alpha stage now and there are no installation packages. if you will want to try it, just copy files iso.bbx, iso.cbx, and all *.lbx files to directory with your document, or create some directory in your texmf tree (see this answer) and put theese files there.

you also need recent version of biblatex, at least version 1.0

some czech documentation is in the file iso-example.pdf.

you want to use numeric method, so you can call like that:

\usepackage{english,czech}{babel} 
\usepackage[
   backend=biber    % ot bibtex
  ,style=iso  
  ,method=numeric        
  ,babel=other        % to support multiple languages in bibliography
  ,sortlocale=cs_CZ   % locale of main language, it is for sorting
]{biblatex}

you use cslatex, it is now obsolete, in either texlive and miktex. you should use just pdflatex with babel, xelatex or lualatex. but in theory it should work even with cslatex.

for second question, try:

\DeclareCiteCommand{\cite}
  {\usebibmacro{prenote}}
  {\usebibmacro{citeindex}%
   \ensuremath{^{\textrm{\footnotesize\printfield{labelnumber}}}}}
  {\multicitedelim}
  {\usebibmacro{postnote}}

Answer 2

The main reference for writing style files is the less than comprehesive Oren Patashnik (1988) Designing BibTEX styles: The part of BibTEX’s documentation that’s not meant for general users.

I answered an overlapping question on Stack Overflow, Showing labels in BibTex, where I give some other resources for getting into hacking style files.

Answer 3

I think nowadays you are better with biblatex to get the desired appearance of your bibliography.