Last summer, I submitted my first paper to the Transportation Research Board (TRB) conference (ultimately accepted, and presented in January 2009). They have recently started accepting papers in PDF form instead of requiring a Word file—and this meant that I could write my paper in LaTeX, my preferred document processing system.
However, TRB doesn’t provide any LaTeX templates, so I took a shot at rolling my own based on the TRB Style Manual. It’s very primitive in its present state, but it’ll handle the page layout, headings, captions, fonts, and bibliography style.
Unfortunately, they still require a Word document if you plan to publish in their journal, Transportation Research Record. I’m submitting my paper to a different journal for publication, and that journal accepts LaTeX submissions. But if the ultimate destination for your paper doesn’t accept LaTeX or PDFs, take care.
- trb_example.tex: the template and an example document
- trb.bst: the bibliography style
- trb_latex.zip: all files, including a demo bibliography
For the record, a little discussion of my adventures in creating all of this. Most of it is fairly straightforward stuff—find the right packages to adjust margins, heading styles, fonts and so on. (Largely, this makes the document more ugly. The TRB journal format is quite unattractive, Word-like and dense, if you ask me.)
The one tricky part was the bibliography style. The recommended TRB citation style is different from any of the built-in LaTeX and BibTeX styles, and I wanted to replicate it correctly. Thankfully, I found the excellent custom-bib program (a.k.a. makebst), which walks through a series of questions to produce a tailor-made Bibliography Style file (bst). I still had to make a few final edits to the resulting bst file (to adjust the volume/number citation style, and technical reports) but thankfully didn’t need to learn much about the cryptic and obscure language they use.
At any rate, it was a surprisingly painless procedure, requiring under a day to get everything working. Now hopefully some other transportation researchers will find this useful and reuse the template.
david is the man! too bad none of the papers I am writing at the moment for submission are aimed at TRB…
Hi David,
Great job!
Thank you for sharing your work!
I appreciate it.
Hank @ Japan
Thanks a lot for the effort. I have been looking for this and thinking of doing this for quite a while.
Thanks to David for the effort! I was checking the TRB instructions for authors this year however and I beleive several things need to be adjusted. The bibliography style also needs more tweeking. I am working on a TRB class and a bibliography style. I will provide them as soon as they are finished sometime this weekend in time for the 2010 deadline submission.
Hi all,
Could you please send me your latex files for TRB 2012?
Many thanks,
Andrea D’Ariano
Thank you. How do you add a figure and use your custom caption functions?
Hi David, tks for your post.
Everything went well for me, except the section numbering, why isn’t there any?
Mahalia – my apologies, there was a missing package: amsmath needed to be included before captions would work. I’ve fixed it.
Tommy – from what I can tell, TRB doesn’t want section numbering.
This is gorgeous. Not the document itself, because we know that’s not true. But your effort is.
Although the “lineno” package seems like it is easier to implement than your “parano” hack.
Thanks Greg; glad it’s helpful. And thanks for the lineno tip – I’ll look into it.
I made some additions/improvements, which you are welcome to incorporate. I discuss them, and provide a new template for download, here: http://ite.ce.gatech.edu/?p=681
Thanks man,
This is a great help.
Thanks from my side, too. Will use it for this year’s submission. Cheers from New Zealand!