This is the README file for myalpha.bst.

Copyright (C) 2012 Sucharit Sarkar.
Contact: sucharit@math.columbia.edu

Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification,
are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright
notice and this notice are preserved.


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myalpha.bst is essentially amsalpha.bst, but with two extra entry
fields: mykey and mylength. 

mykey allows you to use custom keys instead of the auto-generated
ones, and mylength allows you specify the length of the key (as a
string, not a number), instead of relying on the length generated by
the program. The following actual bib file entry is perhaps
illuminating.

@article {OSz-hf-3manifolds,
    AUTHOR = {Ozsv{\'a}th, Peter and Szab{\'o}, Zolt{\'a}n},
     TITLE = {Holomorphic disks and topological invariants for closed
              three-manifolds},
   JOURNAL = {Ann. of Math. (2)},
  FJOURNAL = {Annals of Mathematics. Second Series},
    VOLUME = {159},
      YEAR = {2004},
    NUMBER = {3},
     PAGES = {1027--1158},
      ISSN = {0003-486X},
     CODEN = {ANMAAH},
   MRCLASS = {57M27 (32Q65 57R58)},
  MRNUMBER = {2113019 (2006b:57016)},
MRREVIEWER = {Thomas E. Mark},
       DOI = {10.4007/annals.2004.159.1027},
       URL = {http://dx.doi.org/10.4007/annals.2004.159.1027},
     mykey = {OSz},
}

(Here the autogenerated key would have been OS; we have chosen a
custom key OSz. Note, we don't need the mylength entry. The program
will correctly calculate the length of this key as `length of OSz'
instead of `length of OS'.)