bib2md

bib2md uses tex4ht and pandoc to convert LaTeX files that include bibliography processed by BibLaTeX into Markdown. It allows users that are familiar with BibLaTeX that want use its power to create markdown files with citations and bibliography lists.

The core consists of the bibliography and citation style (md.bbx, md.cbx) and the tex4ht configuration file md.cfg. * The citation style md.cbx defines a \mdcite that does create a citation suitable to used inline and avoids cite-indices (numbers or keys). The citation uses hyperlinks to the paper (file, doi, or url) if available.

• The bibliography style provides drivers for article, book, inproceedings and thesis entries that use simple entry formatting, again with hyperlinks.

• The md.cfg configures tex4ht and BibLaTeX to use unordered lists for the \printbibliography command and lightweight formatting for \emph and strong.

Requirements

• tex4ht package with XeLaTeX and Biber (tested with TeX Live 2017)
• pandoc (tested with pandoc 1.19.2.4)

Usage

The basic scenario is that you have a .tex file that uses some .bib file. Having the files md.* accessible in your system (for example in your working directory), you can use the following commands to convert a file foo.tex into a .md file with reasonable bibliography formatting.

# Process the bibliography with biber
xelatex foo.tex
biber foo
xelatex foo.tex

# Create a foo.html using tex4ht with the bib2md config file
htxelatex foo.tex md.cfg " -cunihtf -utf8"

# convert the html into markdown using pandoc
pandoc -t markdown foo.html | sed 's/\[\]{#page.1}\[\]{#X0-}//' > foo.md

Customization

The citation command \mdcite can be easily extended by redefining the macro fincite that allows you to add anything after the citation. The bibliography entries can be extended in the standard BibLaTeX way -- by redefining the finentry macro.

The md-notes-short-conf style

The style uses the hooks above to add link to file with the user's notes. It currectly expects the filename to be stored in the annotation field. This is subject to change.

The next feature of this style that it prefers the eventtitle to booktitle for the inproceedings entry types. This allows us to specify the conferences abbreviations in the bibliography.

Advanced use

The power of the package can be used to combine the simplicity of Markdown and power of BibLaTeX. You can write most of your text in Markdown and the bibliography-intense parts in LaTeX. You then convert the .tex files into .md and finally merge all the .md files together by pandoc. You can take this README as an example. It was created by the Makefile and that joins README.header.md and files from the example_use directory.

The directory contains the file cite.tex that uses the \mdcite command and the file full_ref.tex that lists all publications from mypub.bib using the \printbibliography command. You can also check the directory for an example Makefile to perform the conversion to md files.

Example of \mdcite and bibliography listing

(README.header.md ends here)

We can write some text here and then cite some our work like this for example Blahoudek et al. (2017): Seminator: A Tool for Semi-Determinization of Omega-Automata. and we may try cite multiple papers in one command Babiak et al. (2013): Effective Translation of LTL to Deterministic Rabin Automata: Beyond the (F, G)-Fragment; Babiak et al. (2015): The Hanoi Omega-Automata Format.

• Tomáš Babiak, František Blahoudek, Alexandre Duret-Lutz, Joachim Klein, Jan Křetínský, David Müller, David Parker, and Jan Strejček (2015).
  The Hanoi Omega-Automata Format. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computer Aided Verification (CAV’15). Lecture Notes in Computer Science (vol. 9206), part I. Springer, pp. 479–486. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-21690-4˙31.
• Tomáš Babiak, František Blahoudek, Mojmír Křetínský, and Jan Strejček (2013).
  Effective Translation of LTL to Deterministic Rabin Automata: Beyond the (F, G)-Fragment. In Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on Automated Technology for Verification and Analysis (ATVA’13). Lecture Notes in Computer Science (vol. 8172). Springer, pp. 24–39. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-02444-8˙4.
• František Blahoudek, Alexandre Duret-Lutz, Mikuláš Klokočka, Mojmír Křetínský, and Jan Strejček (2017).
  Seminator: A Tool for Semi-Determinization of Omega-Automata. In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Logic for Programming, Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning (LPAR-21). EPiC Series in Computing (vol. 46). EasyChair, pp. 356–367. URL: https://easychair.org/publications/paper/340360.
• František Blahoudek, Alexandre Duret-Lutz, Mojmír Křetínský, and Jan Strejček (2014).
  Is there a Best Büchi Automaton for Explicit Model Checking? In Proceedings of 21st International SPIN Symposium on Model Checking of Software (SPIN’14). ACM, pp. 68–76. DOI: 10.1145/2632362.2632377.
• František Blahoudek, Alexandre Duret-Lutz, Vojtěch Rujbr, and Jan Strejček (2015).
  On Refinement of Büchi Automata for Explicit Model Checking. In Proceedings of 22nd International SPIN Symposium on Model Checking of Software (SPIN’15). Lecture Notes in Computer Science (vol. 9232). Springer, pp. 66–83. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-23404-5˙6.
• František Blahoudek, Matthias Heizmann, Sven Schewe, Jan Strejček, and Ming-Hsien Tsai (2016).
  Complementing Semi-deterministic Büchi Automata. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems (TACAS’16). Lecture Notes in Computer Science (vol. 9636). Springer, pp. 770–787. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-662-49674-9˙49.
• František Blahoudek, Mojmír Křetínský, and Jan Strejček (2013).
  Comparison of LTL to Deterministic Rabin Automata Translators. In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Logic for Programming, Artificial Intelligence, and Reasoning (LPAR-19). Lecture Notes in Computer Science (vol. 8312). Springer, pp. 164–172. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-45221-5˙12.