Introduction to Bibolamazi

Bibolamazi lets you prepare consistent and uniform BibTeX files for your LaTeX documents. It lets you prepare your BibTeX entries as you would like them to be—adding missing or dropping irrelevant information, capitalizing names or turning them into initials, converting unicode characters to latex escapes, etc.

Example Usage Scenario

A typical scenario of Bibolamazi usage might be:

• You use a bibliography manager, such as Mendeley, to store all your references. You have maybe configured e.g. Mendeley to keep a BibTeX file Documents/bib/MyLibrary.bib in sync with your library;

• You’re working, say on a document mydoc.tex, which cites entries from MyLibrary.bib;

• You like to keep URLs in your entries in your Mendeley library, because it lets you open the journal page easily, but you don’t want the URLs to be displayed in the bibliography of your document mydoc.tex. But you’ve gone through all the bibliography styles, and really, the one you prefer unfortunatly does display those URLs.

• You don’t want to edit the file MyLibrary.bib, because it would just be overwritten again the next time you open Mendeley. The low-tech solution (what people generally do!) would then be to export the required citations from Mendeley to a new bibtex file, or copy MyLibrary.bib to a new file, and edit that file manually.

• To avoid having to perform this tedious task manually, you can use Bibolamazi to prepare the BibTeX file as you would like it to be. For this specific task, for example, you would perform the following steps:

  • Create a bibolamazi file, say, mydoc.bibolamazi.bib;

  • Specify as a source your original MyLibrary.bib:

    src: ~/Documents/bib/MyLibrary.bib
    

  • Give the following filter command:

    filter: url -dStrip
    

    which instructs to strip all urls (check out the documentation of the url filter in the Help & Reference Browser)

  • Run bibolamazi.

  • Use this file as your bibtex bibliography, i.e. in your LaTeX document, use:

    \bibliography{mydoc.bibolamazi}
    

  Note that you can then run Bibolamazi as many times as you like, to update your file, should there have been changes to your original MyLibrary.bib, for example.

Teaser: Features

The most prominent features of Bibolamazi include:

• A duplicates filter allows you to efficiently collaborate on LaTeX documents: in your shared LaTeX document, each collaborator may cite entries in his own bibliography database (each a source in the bibolamazi file). Then, if instructed to do so, bibolamazi will detect when two entries are duplicates of each other, merge their information, and produce LaTeX definitions such that the entries become aliases of one another. Then both entry keys will refer to the same entry in the bibliography.

  Catch: there is one catch to this, though, which we can do nothing about: if two entries in two different database share the same key, but refer to different entries. This may happen, for example, if you have automatic citation keys of the form AuthorYYYY, and if the author published several papers that same year.

• A powerful arxiv filter, which can normalize the way entries refer to the arXiv.org online preprint repository. It can distinguish between published and unpublished entries, and its output is highly customizable.

• A general-purpose fixes filter provides general fixes that are usually welcome in a BibTeX files. For example, revtex doesn’t like Mendeley’s way of exporting swedish ‘Å’, for example in Åberg, as \AA berg, and introduces a space between the ‘Å’ and the ‘berg’. This filter allows you to fix this.

• Many more! Check out the filter list in the Help & Reference Browser window of Bibolamazi!