BibTool

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 60 pa­ges (and still growing).

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