Forum Discussion
Word bibliography
This is the reply I sent to Stefan Blom after examining the document:
This is a weird one. The cause of the problem turned out to be the excessively long URLs in citations [10] and [11], which had no place to put reasonable line breaks for three or four lines. Adding space characters at strategic points in those URLs made the table columns return to normal.
Getting there was quite a trip. First I looked at the XML in XMLNotepad, but it looked quite ordinary. I tried changing the Column settings in Table Properties from percentages to absolute sizes, but that didn’t help. I started a new blank document, inserted a table with properly sized columns, and copied the citations one at a time (without the row end markers) to paste into the new table. That worked perfectly for the first nine citations, but pasting in the tenth one made the new table look like the original. Aha! Pasting just the number in the first column was ok, but as soon as I pasted the second column it resized the columns in the whole table. After futzing around a bit, I tried inserting spaces, and that worked. The eleventh citation needed the same treatment.
I don’t know whether the spaces will make the URLs unusable in a browser, as I haven’t tried it. I suspect this document is meant to be printed (otherwise the author would have made the URLs into hyperlinks), so it shouldn’t be a problem.
The specific bibliography format you have selected makes use of a two-column table, and for some reason the first column is too narrow. I'll ask some fellow Word MVPs and see if they can figure out what is causing the problem (it could be something with the underlying XML structure).
This is the reply I sent to Stefan Blom after examining the document:
This is a weird one. The cause of the problem turned out to be the excessively long URLs in citations [10] and [11], which had no place to put reasonable line breaks for three or four lines. Adding space characters at strategic points in those URLs made the table columns return to normal.
Getting there was quite a trip. First I looked at the XML in XMLNotepad, but it looked quite ordinary. I tried changing the Column settings in Table Properties from percentages to absolute sizes, but that didn’t help. I started a new blank document, inserted a table with properly sized columns, and copied the citations one at a time (without the row end markers) to paste into the new table. That worked perfectly for the first nine citations, but pasting in the tenth one made the new table look like the original. Aha! Pasting just the number in the first column was ok, but as soon as I pasted the second column it resized the columns in the whole table. After futzing around a bit, I tried inserting spaces, and that worked. The eleventh citation needed the same treatment.
I don’t know whether the spaces will make the URLs unusable in a browser, as I haven’t tried it. I suspect this document is meant to be printed (otherwise the author would have made the URLs into hyperlinks), so it shouldn’t be a problem.