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tkbibtex

NAME

tkbibtex - portable BibTeX editor and browser

SYNOPSIS

tkbibtex [bibfile]

DESCRIPTION

tkbibtex is a portable editor and browser for BibTeX format file. It is written in Tcl/Tk and runs under Unix or Windows based wish interpreters. It is inspired by, or modeled on, an old OpenWindows application called bibcard. It also has a non-GUI command line mode which is useful for generating publication lists.

tkbibtex supports 3 different windows. The first is a scrolling list of cite keys which has a toolbar with File, Edit and Help menus. The bibtex file can be given on the command line (it will be searched for along the path given by the BIBPATH envariable), or opened via the File/Open command. The current bib file name is shown in the title bar, as well as the modification status. Double clicking on an entry brings up the selected citation in the browser window. The up and down arrow keys can also be used to move up and down the citation list.

The browser window shows all the fields associated with the selected entry and its title bar shows the citation key. The fields shown depend on the citation type which can be changed by the reference type menu button. Required fields have a bold label while optional fields have an italic label. String values are preceeded by a hash.

The search window provides a wide variety of searching modes. The search can cover all fields or be limited to a specific field. The search can be further constrained by reference type and year range by specifying either or both a starting and ending (inclusive) year. A list of matching cite keys is listed in this window, and once again double clicking or up/down arrow keys can be used to browse this list using the browser window.

Features

The following are features I think are particularly cute.

* In the browser window you can right-click in a field and it will bring up a menu of string constants. I normally define strings for journal names. The name of the bibtex string file that is used to build the menu can be set in the .tkbibtexrc file (eg. set strfile strings.bib). It is searched for along the BIBPATH.

* The browser window has an `Annote' button which expands the annotation window. This scrolling text entry box allows for an arbitrary amount of freeform text to be stored in the bibtex file in the ANNOTE field. This is useful for storing commentary or reviews of papers read. This material does not appear in the bibliography with any of the normal reference styles.

* Multiple selection is enabled in the main and search window citation lists.

* Edit/Copy copies the actual bibtex source of selected citations to the clipboard.

* Edit/Paste pastes bibtex source into the bibliography.

* Single-key shortcuts exist for most menu functions, see Help for details.

* Every time tkbibtex writes an output file it copies the existing bib file to a unique name. These build up over time and should be periodically culled.

NON-GUI MODE

tkbibtex also has a command line mode

tkbibtex [switches] [bibfile]

which can be used to select entries from the bibfile according to various filtering options.

-type string

apply search only to refernces of the specified type, ie. article or inproceedings. This can also be a regexp, eg. article!inproceedings

-field string

apply search only to the specified field.

-search string

filter out all citations that match this string

-ys year

filter out articles with year greater than or equal to that specified (default 0)

-ye year

filter out articles with year less than or equal to that specified (default 9999)

-last nyears

filter out articles whose year falls within the last nyears

-exact

make all searches case sensitive

-count

instead of outputting BibTeX entries to stdout, just count the matching references.

-list

instead of outputting BibTeX entries to stdout, provide a one line summary of the form "key (type): title".

For example, to count the number of journal papers jointly authored with Foo before 1997, we could use the command line

% tkbibtex -count -ye 1997 -field author -search Foo publist.bib

FILES

At startup a file called .tkbibtexrc in the user's home directory is sourced if it exists.

ENVIRONMENT

BIBPATH is a colon separated list of directories which will be searched for named bib files.

SEE ALSO

bibtex, latex, tcl, tk

BUGS

The parser for the bibtex file format is simple minded and expects each record to occupy a single line, ending with a "}" or "},". The last line of each group must be a close brace on a line by itself. This means that old, existing, bib files may need some manual editing before they will work with tkbibtex.

AUTHOR

P.I. Corke
pic@cat.csiro.au