The Problem of Long References

First, you we should observe that there is no problem combining many citations in a single reference. Obviously, this can be done by typing them in as the argument of any one of the reference commands. If, however, you wish to have a series of citations all appear under the same number, but wish to have them appear on individual lines all you have to do is follow each one by the command
nextline
. What
nextline
does is generate a neat break and starts TEX off printing the material which follows at the beginning of a new line. The important fact about
nextline
is that it preserves the indentation of the text established by the reference macro.

This brings us to the second point. What happens if you wish to have a reference which consists of several paragraphs ? Here you have to be careful, since if you use the command
par
or leave a blank line (which amounts to the same thing) you will spoil the indentation of the text material. To avoid this a special macro exists called
subpar
. To get vertical space between text in a single reference type the command
subpar
whenever you would ordinarily insert the command
par
or leave a blank line. It will accomplish the same feat as
par
noindent
but it will not mess up the formatting of the reference page.

Having discussed the way to properly generate long references, we now come to the problems this will cause. The fact is, TEX has trouble writing long lines to an external file. Since, as far as TEX is concerned the argument of any one of the reference macros is just one long line, there will come the time when TEX will complain in a mysterious way. If you are running interactively it will issue a horrible looking PASCAL error message (sending the unforwarned into a case of cardiac arrest) and then continue with its processing. Since TEX will resume processing after this frightening hiatus you will promptly recover, shake your head and say Ain't computers peculiar?. You will also, in all probability, ignore the fact that it happened. This will be a mistake. If you look in referenc.texauxil on your A disk, you will find that TEX has found one of the references is too long and has chopped it off, replacing most of the text by
ETC
. I presume that in general this will not be what you intended. Have no fear, PHYZZX is here ! There is a control sequence which solves this problem; unfortunately, it is not a really neat solution. The solution is to go back into the reference and type
splitout
at various places in the text. This command tells TEX to begin sending a new line to the file. As I said, this is a solution but not an elegant one. We are saddened that the elegant solution has escaped us and hope that a TEXpert out there will tell us a better way to proceed.