bibtex2html

This tool converts a bibtex file or a folder with multiple bibtex files into an HTML bibliography.

Compatibility

The tool has been written for Ubuntu and tested on Python v3.5 and above but is also compatible with previous and newer versions of python3.

Dependencies

Requires python3, the argparse package from Python Standard Library and the bibtexparser package (available via pip):

pip install bibtexparser

Usage

This tool has been written primarily for the purpose of generating a list of publications for websites from bibtex files. The tool can be run as a Python script, e.g.:

python3 bibtex2html.py -b <bib> -o <outfile> -f <format>

It accepts the following command-line arguments:

-b, --bib: Path to the BibTeX file or directory containing BibTeX files.
-o, --outfile: Path for the output HTML file.
-f, --format (default=str): Format of HTML bibliography [std, std_b, str, str_c].
-m_fmt, --month_format (default=abbrv): Format of month [abbrv, full].
-nobr, --no_break (default=False): Flag to prevent any <br> tags in the generated HTML (see **Note 3** below).
-yb, --year_breaks (default=False): Flag to add year headers between the reverse chronologically sorted list of publications.
-yc, --year_cutoff (int, default=None): If <year_breaks> is True, all publications before the <year_cutoff> are grouped together.

The HTML bibliography is generated in a reverse chronological order and a paper link is also shown at the end of each reference if the URL field is present in the corresponding bibentry. Note that even though bibtex supports citations for many entry types, this tool mostly focuses on the following entry types: inproceedings, article, book, phdthesis and mastersthesis. When citing other entry types it still produces a basic citation with the author, title and year fields (see Note 1 below).

The tool currently supports four values for the argument:

std: Standard citation-style bibliography with a paper link at the end (if URL present in bibentry).
std_b: Same as std, except with a bold title.
str: Structured format with upto four lines. 1st line: bold title, 2nd line: author list, 3rd line: venue and time[, 4th line: paper link, if URL present in bibentry).
str_c: Same as str, but the second and third lines have a color coding.

Example

For a working example which uses the custom syntax with a variety of the above commands, execute the following on the command-line:

python3 bibtex2html.py -b example/biblio.bib -o example/biblio.html -f str -yb -yc 2010

The above uses the sample input file in the example folder. A copy of the generated output file (biblio.html) is already present in the example folder for reference.

Notes

Note 1:

For citation purposes, every bibentry must have at least the following attributes: author (or editor for entry of type book), title and year. Additionally entries of type inproceedings must have a booktitle attribute and entries of type article must have a journal attribute.

Note 2:

For bibentries of type book, the editor attribute in --bibfile is checked before the author attribute to generate authors in the HTML bibliography. Exactly one of editor or author attributes is expected for bibentry of type book. If both are provided, the editor attribute overrides author.

Note 3:

The --no_break argument is sometimes useful while generating reference lists for platforms like Wordpress, which insert <br> tags automatically.