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      BibTool: A Tool for Manipulating BibTeX Data Bases

BibTeX provides an easy to use means to integrate citations and bibliographies into LaTeX documents. But the user is left alone with the management of the BibTeX files. The program BibTool is intended to fill this gap. BibTool allows the manipulation of BibTeX files which goes beyond the possibilities — and intentions — of BibTeX. The possibilities of BibTool include

• Pretty-printing BibTeX data bases adjustable by lots of parameters.

• Syntactic checks with error recovery superior to BibTeX and helpful error messages.

• Semantic checks can be specified by the user.

• Sorting and merging of BibTeX data bases according to a free definable sort key.

• Generation of uniform reference keys according to predefined rules or according to an own specification.

• Selecting references used in one publication which are found by analyzing an .aux file.

• Selecting references by a set of criteria (regular expressions).

• Controlled rewriting of fields utilizing regular expressions to specify the rewriting rules.

• Macro (String) expansion to eliminate the need of extra string definitions.

• Collecting statistics about one or more BibTeX data bases.

BibTool contains a documentation written in LaTeX of more than 80 pages (and still growing).

BibTool is written in C and has been compiled on various operating systems like flavors of Unix and MSDOG machines. It is distributed in source code. No compiled versions are available from the author (Useless to ask!).

Binary Distributions

There exist binary distributions of BibTool for several operating systems. For instance users of Debian based Linux systems can access BibTool via their native package manager.

Before installing from the sources you might want to check whether the package manager of your system provides a sufficiently recent version of BibTool.

CTAN Download

BibTool can be obtained from the CTAN archives:

• https://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/biblio/bibtex/utils/bibtool

or via the BibTool home page

• http://www.gerd-neugebauer.de/software/TeX/BibTool

Get the file BibTool-x.xx.tar.gz where x.xx is the version number. Unpack it with the command (on Unix)

gunzip < BibTool-x.xx.tar.gz | tar -xvf -

It will create a directory named BibTool which contains the installation instructions in the file install.tex.

A signature for the source bundle is provided as well. My public key can be found on http://pgp.mit.edu/. You should search for my email address.

Licenses

The sources of BibTool are distributed under the GNU General Public License version 2 or later.

The documentation is distributed under the Creative Commons Attributation-Share Alike 3.0 License.

The distribution of BibTool contains the following third-party software which is released under their own licenses:

• GNU regex library 0.12 is located in the directory regex-0.12. It is distributed under the GNU General Public License version 2 or later.

• mkdirchain consists of the file mkdirchain. It is in the public domain.

• install-sh consists of the file install-sh. It is distributed under the MIT license contained in this file.

Enjoy it!

Gerd Neugebauer mailto:gene@gerd-neugebauer.de