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Urlbst

Contents

• Usage
• For example...
• Download and installation
• Licences
• Further Information
• Version history, and release notes

The standard BibTeX styles have no explicit support for the web, in that they include no `webpage' type, and have no support for adding URLs to references. There are rumours that such support might appear in BibTeX 1.0, but there is no estimate of when that is likely to arrive.

The Perl script urlbst can be used to add this support to an arbitrary .bst file which has a reasonably `conventional' structure. The result is meant to be robust rather than pretty.

It has a different goal from Patrick Daly's `custom-bib' package -- that is intended to create a BibTeX style .bst file from scratch, and supports `url' and `eprint' fields. This package, on the other hand, is intended for the case where you already have a style file that works (or at least, which you cannot or will not change), and edits it to add the new webpage entry type, plus the url, lastchecked and eprint fields. Fuller details are in the manual.

Usage

urlbst [--literal key=value] [--setting key=value]
           [input-file [output-file]]

If either the input-file or the output-file is omitted, they default to stdin and stdout respectively. If the input file already has a URL entry type, then the script objects. By default (in the current version), the output includes support for eprint, doi and pubmed.

The support in the generated .bst file can be adjusted with the options --setting and --literal; see --setting help and --literal help for the available switches. The options --[no]eprint, --[no]doi, --[no]pubmed, --inlinelinks, --nohyperlinks, --hypertex and --hyperref are shortcuts for some of these settings.

The added fields are:

• url and lastchecked, to associate a URL with a reference, along with the date at which the URL was last checked to exist;
• doi, for a reference's DOI;
• eprint, for an arXiv eprint reference; and
• pubmed for a reference's PubMed identifier (PMID).

If setting hrefform is 1 or 2, then the generated .bst file includes support for hyperlinks in the generated eprint entries in the bibliography, with the format being either HyperTeX (see arXiv, again), supported by xdvi, dvips and others, or using the support available from the hyperref package. When URLs are included in the bibliography, they are written out using the \url{...} command, and hyperref automatically processes that in the correct way to include a hyperlink.

The setting inlinelinks (option --inlinelinks) tells urlbst not to write out the URL as text within the bibliography entry. Instead, urlbst will produce a more conventional-looking and compact bibliography entry, but the entry's title will now be a hyperlink to that URL. This hyperlink may be useful to anyone who reads your document online (this option can only be used with hrefform 1 or 2. Any DOI or eprint text which would be produced as a result of the appropriate option will still appear in this mode.

You may adjust various literal strings, either for the purposes of internationalisation, or simply because you prefer different text. To do this, give the --literal option, followed by a key=value pair, for example --literal online="on th'intert00bs", to replace the default URL: text. The possible values, and their defaults, are below (say --literal help to get this list printed out):

The list of settings (--setting help) is:

The distribution includes preconverted versions of the four standard BibTeX .bst style files.

Only the style files which result from conversion of the standard styles are checked in the regression tests. Other style files which are known to work include

acm.bst, amsalpha.bst, amsplain.bst, apalike.bst, gerabbrv.bst, geralpha.bst, gerapali.bst, gerplain.bst, gerunsrt.bst, ieeetr.bst, siam.bst, mla.bst

Style files which are known to fail:

• Currently (as of at least v0.5), there exists a style achicago.bst which seems to fox urlbst; it turns out that there's a simpler but almost equivalent style chicago.bst which works.
• Some APA-like styles, including at least apager.bst, seem to be sufficiently different from the most common styles, that they confuse urlbst completely.
• The koma-script styles and the refer styles are not designed to produce conventional .bbl files, and urlbst does not aim to produce anything useful from these.

This might be a good time for me to revisit the rather convoluted logic within the script, to make it a little more robust in the face of variants like these, but don't hold your breath. The logic within the script is pretty hideous (it essentially works by spotting patterns in the input style file, and replacing or extending bits of BibTeX style-file code. This is a fragile technique, and is probably at the limits of its usefulness, therefore I'd take some persuading to add significant extra functionality to the script.

The natbib and revtex style files already have URL fields. If you have a BibTeX style file which you think ought to work, but with which the script fails, send it to me, and I'll try to work out what I've missed (no promises, though).

Note that the command to invoke the script changed from `urlbst.pl' to plain `urlbst' between versions 0.3 and 0.4.

For example...

To add URL support to the standard siam.bst file, you can give the command

% urlbst /path/to/original/siam.bst siamurl.bst

Your TeX installation will likely have some way of helping you find where the original .bst files are. On teTeX-based systems, for example, the command kpsewhich siam.bst returns the full path of the siam.bst file which BibTeX would find.

The distributed files abbrvurl.bst, alphaurl.bst, plainurl.bst and unsrturl.bst are versions of the standard style files which have been pre-converted.

There is more general discussion of including URLs in bibliographies in the TeX FAQ.

Download and installation

Download the file as a tarball or zip file and unpack it. Or you can clone the source repository online.

To install, you should simply copy the distributed urlbst script to someplace on the path (such as /usr/local/bin, or ~/local/bin, depending on your privileges and tastes).

If you (might) want to use the pre-converted standard .bst files, then you'll need to copy these to somewhere in the BibTeX search path. Type kpsepath bst on Unix to find out the list of places BibTeX searches, and pick either one of the user-local locations, or a system-wide one. If you're installing in a system-wide location, you'll need admin privileges, obviously, and you will probably need to use texhash, mktexlsr or its equivalent, to update LaTeX's filename cache. For further hints here, see the TeX FAQ entries on installing a package and where LaTeX puts files.

That should be all you have to do.

The urlbst script is distributed with a path which should just work, as long as the Perl binary is in your path, but if you have problems here, then you might want to change the first line to something like

#! /usr/local/bin/perl

if that's where your Perl binary is.

You can also use the conventional ./configure; make; make install to configure and install the package (as root, or using sudo if you're installing it in a system location), though you still have to install the .bst files by hand. This is rather heavyweight for the trivial amount of configuration required, so it's almost always simpler just to do things by hand.

If you need to change some of the urlbst defaults, however, or if your fingers type ./configure spontaneously, then you can be reassured that the configure script supports the standard --prefix option, plus the following options setting defaults:

--with-eprints=url, --without-eprints

This makes the --eprints option to urlbst available by default, and allows you to optionally specify a prefix for creating URLs from eprint numbers. The default for this URL is http://arxiv.org/abs/ -- this is appropriate for arXiv, obviously, but there are now a variety of other preprint archives appearing, for which this might be inappropriate. If you have comments on this default, or alternatives, please let me know. This option is enabled by default; if you have some reason for disabling the --eprints option for urlbst, the give the configure option --without-eprints

--with-doi=url, --without-doi

This makes available the --doi option to urlbst and, as with the --with-eprints option, allows you to customise the DOI resolver URL. The --doi option to urlbst is on by default.

--with-href=0/1/2

This allows you to specify the type of hyperlinks which are inserted in the bibliography. Values 0, 1 and 2, indicating no hyperlinks, hypertex-style links, and hyperref-style links, respectively. The default is --with-href=0. The hyperref-style option is intended to complement the increasingly standard hyperref package.

The first two options simply change defaults, and if you never use the new eprints or doi fields, then the defaults don't matter to you.

Since the modified style generates URLs wrapped in the \url{} macro, it is useful to use the resulting bibliography style alongside the url package. Since this tends to work with hyperref anyway, where possible, you don't get any extra goodness by changing the --with-href default at configuration time.

Documentation

Basic documentation is in the file urlbst.tex. This is distributed as a PDF file, but if you want to regenerate it, use

% latex urlbst
% bibtex urlbst
% latex urlbst
% latex urlbst

Licences

The copyright and licence position for the modified .bst files seems slightly muddy to me. On the grounds that any licence is better than no licence, I therefore assert that the modifications which the urlbst program makes to these files are copyright 2002–23, Norman Gray, and that these modifications are available for distribution under the terms of the LaTeX Project Public Licence.

The original .bst files are copyright Howard Trickey and Oren Patashnik, with a set of permissions, in text at the top of the files, which state that "Unlimited copying and redistribution of this file are permitted as long as it is unmodified" (see the files for the complete text). The distribution terms above therefore appear to be compatible with -- in the sense of being morally equivalent to -- these terms in the .bst file. If anyone disagrees with the logic here, I'd be very happy to discuss that.

The urlbst script itself is distributed under the GPL, version 2.0.

See the files LICENCE-lppl.txt and LICENCE-gpl-2.0.txt in the distribution, for the relevant licence text.

Further Information and acknowledgements

urlbst is archived on CTAN, and discussed in the TeX FAQ.

The source code for the package is maintained online.

The home page of urlbst might possibly have more recent versions than the one you're looking at now.

Acknowledgements, and release notes

Copyright 2002–23, Norman Gray. Released under the terms of the GNU General Public Licence.

These binaries (installable software) and packages are in development.
They may not be fully stable and should be used with caution. We make no claims about them.