English bibliography style

Question

I try to create an english bibliography in TexShop on Mac. What I want is a bibliography formatted in plaindin like this:

[1] Woods, W. A.: What’s in a Link: Foundations for Semantic Networks. In: Bobrow, D. G. (eds.) ; Collins, A. (eds.): Representation and Understanding. Academic Press, 1975, S. 35–82

However, the output I get is:

[1] Woods, W. A.: What’s in a Link: Foundations for Semantic Networks. In: Bobrow, D. G. (Hrsg.) ; Collins, A. (Hrsg.): Representation and Understanding. Academic Press, 1975, S. 35–82

Note, that the difference is "eds." and "Hrsg.".

The code of my .tex document is:

\documentclass[12pt,a4paper,oneside,openright]{report}
 \begin{document}
 Test \cite{Woods:75a}
 \bibliography{mylit}
 \bibliographystyle{plaindin} 
 \end{document}

The content of mylit.bib is:

@incollection{Woods:75a,
    Author = {Woods, W. A.},
    Booktitle = {Representation and Understanding},
    Editor = {Bobrow, D. G. and Collins, A.},
    Pages = {35--82},
    Publisher = {Academic Press},
    Title = {What's in a Link: Foundations for Semantic Networks},
    Year = {1975}}

So, why do I get the german format? The system language of my computer is german. Can I change the bibliography language to english, or set the default langauge to english for latex?

Thanks for your help, Mirko

Answer 1

As you may know DIN is the "Deutsche Institut fuer Normung". I guess that the intention of this style was to work for German texts only and there is no language support added.

If this is the only problem you have with this style, find the file plaindin.bst on your system, copy and rename it and but it in the same folder as your tex-file.

Open the file (assume we named it myplain.bst) and search& replace all occurrences of Hrsg. with eds. Save it and adjust your style to:\bibliographystyle{myplain}

If you want to go a step further, simple styles like this one can be created fairly straightforward in biblatex. This would give you the full control, but might be a bit much for this little problem here.