Using LaTeX to Write Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) Style Papers

[NOTE: See my wiki page on SBL LaTeX for more and more up-to-date information than this blog post.]

My Duke Divinity School classes all require Society of Biblical Literature format for their papers. Having become horribly annoyed with Word and OpenOffice’s inability to handle intermingled Hebrew and English words (not to mention annoyed with manually typesetting all the appropriate formatting), I decided to shift to LaTeX for writing papers. David Knauert (RIP) used LaTeX (and emacs) for his doctoral dissertation, so if its Hebrew support was good enough for him, it should be good enough for me.

It’s been a pain in the ass to get it to actually work well, but I’m rather pleased by the results. I’m still working on getting the SBL format just right, but it is coming along rather nicely. I’ve also discovered a number of SBL formatting rules that make me happy I’m no longer using a word processor, such as the SBL’s rule that one shall not indent the first paragraph of any section. Here are a *.tex file and the resulting PDF to demonstrate the formatting.

If you don’t know what LaTeX (pronounced “LAY-tek”) is, check out An introduction to LaTeX, followed by The (Not So) Short Introduction to LaTeX2e.

If you’d like to use it and you’re on Mac OS-X, here’s how you can use it. (If you’d like to use it and you’re on anything else, you’re on your own.)

First, install MacTeX and BibDesk. Create a folder somewhere (e.g. ~/lib/latex), and drop rcfsblpaper.cls into it. Also unzip frankenstein.zip in that directory. Then modify your environment variables (instructions how to do that are here), assigning your newly-created folder and the frankenstein folder within it to the TEXINPUTS and BIBINPUTS variables: it’ll look something like /Users/myname/lib/latex:/Users/myname/lib/latex/frankenstein. Then use BibDesk to create a bibliography library named religious in the newly-created folder.

With that done, you’re pretty much ready to go. If you use one of the MacTeX GUIs to develop, you’re on your own to figure out how to work them. I’m using vi, although people new to terminal editors often find nano easier to work with (and if you’re new to the Mac command line, check out the many nifty tutorials out there). Use BibDesk to manage your religious library, and you’ll have a nicely-organized and infinitely citable repository of books (even for your Word docs).

The basic template for any SBL paper will now look something like this:

\documentclass{rcfsblpaper}
 
\author{Robert Fischer}
\date{Spring 2010}
\title{Joel~2:1--17---A Passage to Train the Soul}
 
\begin{document}
\makestart
 
% Content goes here
 
\makebib
\end{document}

In the body, you can use Hebrew by installing the SBL’s Hebrew font and keyboard drivers (I use SIL for my keyboard), and then wrapping Hebrew in the \hebrew command: e.g. \hebrew{שׁוב}. The fancy-cased “Lord” can be generated with the \Lord command, and the Hebrew Tetragrammaton can be generated with the \tetra command.

(Another aside on keyboard usage: if you go to the System Preferences, then into International, you can turn on the input menu in the menu bar (making it easier to figure out what you’re typing in), and you can check the box to add the Character Palette and Keyboard Viewer into that menu. If you leave the Keyboard Viewer up, you can see what you’re about to type, and if you hold shift and/or option, the Keyboard Viewer will change to reflect the modified keyboard. So that’s a nice way to go hunting for that character you can’t remember how to type. When you get rolling, it’s also kinda cool to watch it blink and flash with your typing speed.)

You can publish Bible abbreviations (e.g. NIV, NKJV, NRSV) by using the \bibleabbrv command (also known as \bibleabbr b/c I can never remember if I included the “v” at the end or not): e.g. \bibleabbrv{NIV}. The result will be an appropriately small-capped.

If you quote the Bible, use the \biblequote command, which will add the appropriate quotes, prevent awkward breaks (like the quote and the beginning of the citation being on different lines), and format the citation like the SBL expects. The arguments to the command are: quote, book, chapter:verse, version: e.g. \biblequote{in the days of King Uzziah of Judah and in the days of King Jeroboam son of Joash of Israel}{Amos}{1:1}{NRSV}. The version is important because the SBL has particularly anal rules about when you should or should not cite the Bible version, which you don’t need to worry about if you’re using my document class. The only thing important is that if you always want the Bible version printed out, you can signal that with the \ismultibible command.

For citing Bible verses, I’m currently using the bibleref package, so see its documentation for details. A very old version of it ships with MacTeX, but aside from one minor bug (which I work around in my document class), it seems to work out pretty well. I’m not impressed with its indexing capabilities (I’d like to have a separate index for Bible passages, sorted by order in the Bible), but it’s otherwise pretty nifty.

For long Bible verse cites, use the biblepassage environment. The verse marker can be written using the \versemark command: e.g. \versemark{2}. You can force the indent of a verse by saying
\verseindent{} at the start of a line. Remember that LaTeX ignores carriage returns (*handwave*), so if you want a hard break, you have to end your line with \\.

Right now, the footer is using the full author name. If you want to change that, issue a command like the following somewhere in the body of your document:

\rewnewcommand{\RCFSBLAuthor}[0] { Fischer } % Replace "Fischer" with the name you want in the footer

Here’s a little script that I run to generate PDFs from the LaTeX file. Drop it into ~/.profile and you’ll be good to go. To generate foo.pdf from foo.tex, you simply call sbl foo.

function sbl { clear rm -vf $1.pdf ltxdir=$TMPDIR/sbl/$RANDOM/$RANDOM/$RANDOM echo $ltxdir rm -rvf $ltxdir mkdir -vp $ltxdir base=`pwd` OLD_TEXINPUTS="$TEXINPUTS" TEXINPUTS="$TEXINPUTS:$base" cp -v $1.tex $ltxdir/ cd $ltxdir xelatex -file-line-error $1 bibtex $1 xelatex -interaction=batchmode $1 xelatex -interaction=batchmode $1 #makeindex *.idx #xelatex -interaction=batchmode $1 cp -v $1.pdf "$base/" cd "$base" rm -rvf $ltxdir TEXINPUTS="$OLD_TEXINPUTS"
}

The commented-out lines can be put back in if you’re generating an index for your paper (which would be kinda odd, but there you go).

To spell check your paper, you need to install ispell (which you can get via MacPorts). Then just run ispell -t foo.tex, and you have a nice interactive spellchecker.

The word count of your paper can be determined by using texcount (e.g. texcount foo.tex).

Those last two are basically all I used OpenOffice/Word for, and the resulting papers via LaTeX are a lot easier on the eyes. Although I’m getting almost fetishistic about where line breaks are allowed to occur.

A few TODOs for the document class:

• I need to come up with some good title format.
• I want to be able to generate document indices in a nicer way.
• I’d like to break out the package-y stuff into a package, because the goal would be to have a family of document classes.
• I should get this up onto CTAN when it gets stabilized.
• The bibref package is very powerful and very cool, but it needs some help to be just right: specifically, it needs a bit more space in the resulting output for the SBL to be happy. I’d also like it to generate a separate (and better-sorted) index for Bible verses if the multind package is loaded. It also needs to be able to break down multi-verse citations (e.g. Joel 2:1,15;3:5) into its constituent parts for indexing (e.g. Joel 2:1, Joel 2:15, Joel 3:5). But all of this involves some seriously tricky LaTeX coding, which I’m not up for right now.
• I don’t actually have Turabian citation style kicking around: everything’s Chicago at this point, and it’s all inline citation style. I find that really, really ugly, and I’d prefer a footnote citation style if I could get away with it.
• The biblepassage environment is annoyingly difficult to use. Some day I may make this easier by extending the verbatim environment and undoing all the font modifications it does, but that’s another time.
• I really should make changing the footer name easier.

The style is maintained as a GitHub repository: RobertFischer/latex-sbl-paper. Its license can be found here (GNU AGPL 3.0 as of this writing).

Comments

• April 18, 2010, Michael Eksrand wrote: Very nice. LaTeX is indeed much better than the pain that is a traditional word processor. For readers: if you want LaTeX on Ubuntu or Debian, do "sudo aptitude install texlive-full". If you want it on Windows, install MikTeX and TeXnikcenter (a nice LaTeX editor/environment, if you don't want to use Emacs or Vim or Notepad).
• April 18, 2010, Robert Fischer wrote: Reminds me of this bit from XKCD's April Fools joke.
• April 18, 2010, David Purton wrote: Nice to see some more LaTeX users. I have written something similar and it does currently do footnote style referencing to SBL standards (for most of the reference types). Feel free to offer any suggestions (https://launchpad.net/sbllatex). Not much documentation except for example files yet. There is some on my website for a previous incarnation of the project.
• April 19, 2010, Robert Fischer wrote: Very nice! I couldn't find this when I was Googling around, but I'll take a closer look. Is it still being maintained?
• April 20, 2010, Robert Fischer wrote: There's a couple of problems I've found with your system—first, sbl.bst simply doesn't work for me at all. BibTeX says it can't read it. Second, the footer isn't in the proper format (it should be Name~PageNum). Aside from that, it's pretty nifty. Let me know when you clean those things up.
• April 21, 2010, Robert Fischer wrote: Looks like the footer / page number is okay after all. And the BibTeX issue is that I needed to set $BSTINPUTS (not just $TEXINPUTS and $BIBINPUTS).
• April 30, 2010, Richard Davis wrote: You were right about the bibleref package's indexing capabilities, but see latest version and this thread: http://groups.google.co.uk/group/comp.text.tex/browse_thread/thread/187071ef1fb5b1b6/766c29fbc2d24bca
• May 6, 2010, Robert Fischer wrote: See my wiki page on SBL LaTeX for more and more recent information.
• June 12, 2010, Dan wrote: None of the links to the github repos seem to work. Are you hosting the class somewhere else?
• June 12, 2010, Robert Fischer wrote: See here: Using LaTeX for Society of Biblical Literature Style Papers. I merged my work with the Marshwiggle project.

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