BibBuilder

Python package containing utilities to manuipulate BibTex .bib files.

Quick install

1. Clone the repository
2. Make sure you have pip v10 or greater, either as your system pip or in the virtual environment you will install to (lower versions may work but will give error messages about being unable to build wheels)
3. In the package directory (the one with setup.py) run pip install --user .. If installing to a virtual environment, omit the --user flag.
4. The programs bb-build, bb-web, and bb-merge will be placed in the standard binary (bin) directory for how you ran pip.
5. Add the installation directory to your PATH environmental variable, or link the bb- programs to a directory that is on your PATH.

This has been tested with Python 3.5.

Command line programs available

bb-build

The bb-build program is designed to walk a directory containing PDFs of journal articles, extract their DOIs, and retrieve a BibTex entry for each paper, assembling them into a new .bib file. It is also designed to update a .bib file, meaning:

• It has the option to skip papers in the folder if an entry with the same DOI already exists
• It can store the options used in the .bib file, so that the next update uses the same options

bb-web

The bb-web program is designed to create an HTML file from a .bib file for use on a website. The assumption is that you would have a .bib file containing all publications and/or presentations that you want to include on a website. It has options to:

• Bold one or more authors
• Put papers with a bolder author as first author near the top of each year
• Extract only entries of specific types in the .bib file

bb-merge

The bb-merge program is designed to combine two or more .bib files. It will avoid duplicating identical entries, and by default will ask what to do if it finds two entries that share a key. It also has the option to exclude entries that are identified by a key that exists in one or more "exclude" .bib files - this way you can ensure that the merged .bib file will be compatible as an additional bib resource alongside one or more other .bib files.

Package utilities

In addition to the command line programs, the bib_utils module in this package has several Python objects that can help if you need to write your own Python program to work with .bib files. Some highlights are:

• BetterBibDatabase extends the BibDatabase class from the bibtexparser package that adds convenience functionality (e.g. built-in methods to load from and save to a file, add or remove an entry, etc.) and has a more internally-consistent treatment of entries (currently, all entries are stored in the entries list attribute and the entries_dict attribute is generate from that list on demand, so the two are always linked - the entries_dict cannot be modified directly).
• init_bib_database is a function that creates an instance of BetterBibDatabase and can automatically back up the .bib file.
• pdf2bib is a function that encapsulates reading a PDF file, searching for a DOI and retrieving the BibTex entry. Fair warning: I'm an atmospheric chemist, so I've only tested it on atmospherically relevant journals.