[tex-live] [OS X TeX] cite package broken?

[George N. White III]

On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 1:22 PM, Robin Fairbairns
<Robin.Fairbairns at cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> Ralph Martin <Ralph.Martin at cs.cardiff.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>> A further data point. If I replace
>>
>> \bibliographystyle{eg-alpha}
>>
>> with
>>
>> \bibliographystyle{plain}
>>
>> it all works fine.
>>
>> So the new cite package is seemingly incompatible with the eg-alpha
>> bib style. Whose, fault that is, I have no idea, but the eg-alpha.bst
>> worked fine with the old cite in the past.
>
> did it actually _do_ anything, though?  cite.sty is for sorting and
> compressing numeric citations, one wouldn't expect it to achieve much
> with an alpha bst style.
>
> the docs (in the cite.sty) say:
>
>  o Sort citation numbers into ascending order, printing non-numbers before
>    numbers.  All numbers should be greater than zero.  The [nosort] package
>    option turns off sorting.
>
> does it still fail if you load cite.sty as
>
>  \usepackage[nosort]{cite}
>
> i can well imagine that the author hasn't tested the new version with
> a document whose citations are all non-numeric, but he ought to be
> alerted to the problem, and the result of a [nosort] test might help.

If EG doesn't actually use cite, they should remove it from
their sample documents.

> where's the canonical source for eg-alpha?  i found a copy in a
> repository at cornell, but the canonical source would be good to know.
> (google tediously reports pages containing text such as "... e.g.,
> alpha.bst ...")
>
> robin
>
> who hasn't been to a eurographics conference since the 80s

Infinitely more times, however, than I have.

<http://www.eg.org/EG/Publications/guidelines> has zip archives
with sample files, including formatted output (but not the .log files).

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia