Command line tool for citations and bibliographies

I was work­ing very hard on the new ver­sion of cite­proc-java lately and I’m glad to an­nounce that it has just been re­leased. The high­lights in ver­sion 0.6 are:

  • The bin­ary dis­tri­bu­tion of cite­proc-java con­tains a com­mand line tool that can be used to gen­er­ate cita­tions and bib­li­o­graph­ies without set­ting up a com­plete de­vel­op­ment en­vir­on­ment. Just down­load and ex­tract the zip file and then run citeproc-java -b references.bib -s ieee to cre­ate a bib­li­o­graphy in ieee style for your Bib­TeX in­put file. This fea­ture makes the lib­rary very use­ful even for non-pro­gram­mers.
  • The new Mendeley con­nector al­lows you to use doc­u­ments stored in Mendeley Web as in­put for cita­tions and bib­li­o­graph­ies. Of course this fea­ture also works on the com­mand line.
  • The lib­rary has been tested with the CSL test suite. All 750+ tests run suc­cess­fully! I put a lot of work into this to bring cite­proc-java on par with other CSL pro­cessors.
  • Per­form­ance has been im­proved a lot.

I par­tic­u­larly like the new com­mand line tool that can be used to gen­er­ate cita­tions and bib­li­o­graph­ies from vari­ous sources such as Bib­TeX files or your Mendeley Web cata­log. I ex­pect the tool to be quite use­ful for the fol­low­ing users:

  • Au­thors who want a quick way to pre­view cita­tions or bib­li­o­graph­ies in vari­ous styles
  • Cita­tion Style Lan­guage style au­thors who want to test their style files very quickly

In or­der to use the tool you just have to down­load cite­proc-java and ex­tract the ZIP file. Then you can run the fol­low­ing com­mand to con­vert a Bib­TeX file to a bib­li­o­graphy us­ing the ieee style, for ex­ample:

citeproc-java -b references.bib

If you want to gen­er­ate a bib­li­o­graphy that only con­tains items with cer­tain cita­tion IDs (for ex­ample Fowler_2010 and Kisker_2012) use the fol­low­ing com­mand:

citeproc-java -b references.bib Fowler_2010 Kisker_2012

The tool will even no­tify you if you mis­spelled a cita­tion ID:

citeproc-java: unknown citation id: Fwler_2010
Did you mean `Fowler_2010'?

If you want to con­nect to your Mendeley Web ac­count, use the fol­low­ing com­mand:

citeproc-java --mendeley Fowler_2010 Kisker_2012

The tool has a lot more to of­fer. For more in­form­a­tion run citeproc-java --help or read the lib­rar­y’s doc­u­mentataion.

Posted by Michel Krämer
on October, 25th 2013.

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gradle-download-task: download files with progress

I really like how Gradle dis­plays pro­gress while it’s fetch­ing ar­ti­facts from Maven re­pos­it­or­ies, but I was al­ways won­der­ing why you can­not use the same func­tion­al­ity when you’re down­load­ing ar­bit­rary files in your build script. You can of course use An­t’s down­load task to fetch files, but it does not dis­play pro­gress in­form­a­tion. Since I could­n’t find a solu­tion on the In­ter­net I de­cided to write a plug­in.

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Generating citations and bibliographies with CSL and citeproc-java

I was re­cently writ­ing a sci­entific doc­u­ment with As­ciiDoc. As usual my tool­chain was As­ciiDoc → Doc­Book → FO → PDF. It really worked quite well un­til I came to the point where manu­ally adding cita­tions and edit­ing the bib­li­o­graphy by hand be­came really com­plex and I sud­denly found my­self yearn­ing for more auto­ma­tion.

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