A utility to turn individual BibTeX entries into formatted plain text, markdown, LaTeX, RST, or HTML. Formatting is controlled by a CSL file. Output can be written to the standard output, a file, or the X clipboard.

Copyright Pontus Lurcock, 2016-2017. Released under the MIT licence.

I have a single, large .bib file containing all my bibliographic references. Sometimes I work on documents which require a list of references, but aren't amenable to the use of reference management software – either because the platform (e.g. Google Docs) doesn't support it, or because my co-authors aren't comfortable with it.

In such sitations, I frequently want to extract a one or a few entries from my BibTeX master file, format them according to a specified bibliographic style, and write the output to a file or copy it to the clipboard. This is what qbibformat does. The bibliographic style is defined by a CSL (Citation Style Language) file.

qbibformat requires Python 3 with the Beautiful Soup library, and the external programs bibtool, pandoc, and xclip. Because qbibformat uses xclip to put the reference on the clipboard, it will only work under the X window system.

qbibformat [-h] [-t {text,html,markdown,markdown-pure}]
           [-b <filename>] [-s <filename>]
           [-o <filename>] [-c] [-q]
		   <bibtex-key> [<bibtex-key> ...]

Where the <bibtex-key> arguments are the keys of the items you want to extract from your .bib file.

By default, the formatted entries are written to the standard output only.

-h, --help Display help and exit.

-b <filename>, --bib-file <filename> Bibliography file from which to read entries.

-s <filename>, --style-file <filename> CSL file to use when formatting entries.

-t <type>, --output-type <type> Set output type for formatted entries. Allowed values are text, html, markdown, latex, rst, and markdown-pure. markdown-pure produces markdown without any intermixed HTML fragments, whereas markdown will wrap output in HTML divs, and use HTML formatting for things that markdown can't do (e.g. small capitals).

-o <filename>, --output-file <filename> Write formatted entries to the specified file.

-q, --quiet Do not write formatted entries to standard output.

-c, --clipboard Copy formatted entries to the X clipboard.

The --bib-file and --style-file options can also be specified in a configuration file called .qbibformat in the user's home directory. An example configuration file follows:

[DEFAULT]
StyleFile = harvard1.csl
BibFile = demo.bib

If a --bib-file and --style-file command-line argument is supplied, it will override the corresponding value in the configuration file.

qbibformat --output-type text smith2000weasels

Take the entry smith2000weasels from the configured bibliography file, format it as plain text according to the configured style file, and write it to the standard output.

qbibformat --clipboard --quiet smith2000weasels blazek2001badgers

Take the entries smith2000weaselsand blazek2001badgers from the configured bibliography file, format them as HTML according to the configured style file, and put them on the clipboard.

qbibformat --bib-file demo.bib --style-file harvard1.csl blazek2001badgers

Take the entry blazek2001badgers from demo.bib, format it as HTML according to harvard1.csl, and write it to the standard output.

Note that if the output is sent to the clipboard as HTML, it can only be pasted into applications that accept HTML (e.g. LibreOffice Writer, Google Docs).

Because of the way the X clipboard works, xclip -- and therefore qbibformat -- must keep running in order to supply the clipboard contents when they are pasted. Once the clipboard has been pasted, qbibformat can be terminated with ctrl-C at the command line, or by putting something else on the clipboard.