bibtex_alternative

Do NOT use this package before carefully looking at the ''List of known bugs'' below. If you are not comfortable with this list, I highly recommend either using BibLaTeX (or BibTeX) or managing your bibliography manually.

A minimalistic LaTeX package, called dumbib for bibliography management.

This repository contains

• the dumbib LaTeX package .sty file and its documentation dumbib_user_guide.pdf
• the create_dumbib_database.py Python script, which can be used to create a dumbib database from a BibTeX file, and its helper file called venue_list.csv

For more information about the dumbib package and how to use it, please see the documentation.

The script can be used as follows:

$ python create_dumbib_database.py -in <input_bibtex_database.bib> -out <dumbib_database.tex>

Running this command will extract the publication title, venue, author list, and year of publication from the BibTeX entries and arrange them in an alphabetical order (using the author names) in the dumbib database file. The format used is very close to APA, but has minor differences. The script also produces a log file with the same name as the output file and a .log extension.

Warning: The Python script will write over <dumbib_database.tex> if it already exists. So if you make any changes manually to <dumbib_database.tex>, and later run the Python script with the same output filename in the arguments, those changes will be lost.

List of known bugs

1. (Really problematic!!!) For some reason, HTML version of arXiv doesn't render the underyling commands of dumbib properly. (PDF version on arXiv appears fine though.) As a result, on the HTML version of arXiv papers,
   • the in-text citations do not appear properly,
   • the list of citations in the ''References'' section does not appear at all (only the command \dumbibCreateBibliography is visible instead of the actual list), and
   • at the very beginning of the document, the entire list of \dumbibReferenceEntry command (used to declare the list of references) is visible.
   • For instance, the PDF version of this nice paper by Mohamed, Gautham, and Rupam looks just fine. However, the HTML version of the same paper does not render properly at all.
2. (Minor.) When a citation splits across a page, then everything in between (such as the footer on the first page and the header on the next page) becomes hyperlinked as well.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Mohamed Elsayed for providing the initial motivation to write this package and for subsequently testing it (along with Gautham Vasan and Rupam Mahmood); thanks to Rupam Mahmood for additional encouragement; and thanks to Roshan Shariff for providing initial technical support with LaTeX.