bibclean prettyprints input BibTeX files to stdout, or to a user-specified file, and checks the brace balance and bibliography entry syntax as well.
It can be used to detect problems in BibTeX files that sometimes confuse even BibTeX itself, and importantly, can be used to normalize the appearance of collections of BibTeX files.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- BibTeX items are formatted into a consistent structure with one field = “value” pair per line, and the initial @ and trailing right brace in column 1.
- Tabs are expanded into blank strings; their use is discouraged because they inhibit portability, and can suffer corruption in electronic mail.
- Long string values are split at a blank and continued onto the next line with leading indentation.
- A single blank line separates adjacent bibliography entries.
- Text outside BibTeX entries is passed through verbatim.
- Outer parentheses around entries are converted to braces.
- Personal names in author and editor field values are normalized to the form “P. D. Q. Bach”, from “P.D.Q. Bach” and “Bach, P.D.Q.”.
- Hyphen sequences in page numbers are converted to en-dashes.
- Month values are converted to standard BibTeX string abbreviations.
- In titles, sequences of upper-case characters at brace level zero are braced to protect them from being converted to lower-case letters by some bibliography styles.
- CODEN, ISBN (International Standard Book Number) and ISSN (International Standard Serial Number) entry values are examined to verify the checksums of each listed number, and correct ISBN hyphenation is automatically supplied.
Website: ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/bibclean
Support:
Developer: Nelson H. F. Beebe
License: GNU General Public License v2.0
bibclean is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Terminal-Based Bibliography Tools | |
|---|---|
| coBib | Simple, console-based bibliography management tool |
| papis | Extensible command-line based document and bibliography manager |
| bibiman | TUI for fast and simple interaction with a BibLaTeX database |
| Hayagriva | Rusty bibliography management |
| bibman (Haskell) | CLI/TUI bibliography manager |
| pubs | Bibliography on the command line |
| BibMan (Python) | TUI bibliography manager |
| Xapers | Personal journal article management system |
| Bibman (Perl) | Small console tool for managing BibTeX files |
| papers | Command-line tool to manage bibliography |
| CiteBib | Generate a Bibtex or LaTeX bibliography |
| bibclean | BiBTeX and Scribe bibliography prettyprinter and syntax checker |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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