A Tool to Manipulate BibTeX Files

BibTool Log File

Version 2.46

Gerd Neugebauer

Version 2.46

• Resource sort.cased introduced to allow the sorting order to take advantage of upper and lower case characters. The default is false which is the previous behaviour.

Version 2.45

• Resource suppress.initial.newline introduced to suppress the empty line at the beginning of the output file
• Bugfix: Some C compilers don't like the initialization of static variables with stderr. The code has been moved to a initialization routine.
• Bugfix: -R disables the reading of the resource at the end of processing of command line arguments.
• Bugfix: Parsing of select arguments with backslashes were not treated correctly.
• Minor documentation bugs fixed.

Version 2.44

• Key generation fixed to expand BibTeX strings. The current behaviour is likely to change again in a future release.
• Updated to work with kpathsea 3.1 (partially).
• Searching for the kpathsea library is now the default in the configure script. Thus it is possible to simply place BibTool in a web2c tree. This only requires that the directory is named bibtool and bibtool is added to the filelists in Makefile, configure, and configure.in of the web2c main directory.
• Check.double message improved.
• Initialization bug for kpathsea fixed.
• Bugfix for cross referencing: normalization to lowercase was missing twice.
• Bugfix in the TeX reading routines: spaces after active characters are not ignored. All characters are treated as unsigned. This seems to be preferrable for extended ASCII characters.
• Key generation routines adapted to work with multiple databases. The symbol table is no longer abused to store information for the key generation. This may slow down the key generation a little bit. If it turns out to be a problem I will use a better algorithm.
• Minor modifications in makefiles.
• The configuration of BibTcl is now done automatically.
• New datatype introduced: Uchar will hold UniCode characters in a future release. I just have to find regexp routines to work with UTF-8.
• Extraction extended to allow negation of the regular expression/string matching result. New resources select.non and select.by.non.string to specify such a request. C function add_extract() extended to cover negated values and the former function add_s_extract().

Version 2.43

• Additional library braces.rsc to translate quotes as field delimiters into braces.
• bibtool -h reports now also the library path. This can be used by external scripts to find the installation directory of BibTool.
• Bugfix: comments are no longer crippled.
• Minor bugfix in rewriting code: empty pattern works again.
• The regression tests have revealed a bugfix in the key generation code. I am not aware of the change that has let to this effect but the new behaviour is correct. Before, the macro expansion was suppressed under certain circumstances.
• BibTcl: bibtool count db added.
• BibTcl fix: bibtool missing ignores the case of the field name.
• BibTcl: consistently renaming record to entry.
• Minor modifications of makefile to correctly generate libbib.a and install the header files.
• Reorganization of the code; header files are now in their own directory. I don't have the appropriate information for some DOS compilers yet. Thus minor modifications in the makefile might be required.
• C function entry_statistics() removed. The functionality can be modeled with the new C function db_count(). This takes into account that several databases can be managed internally.
• C function save_word() renamed to add_word(). list_words() removed since it has been used for debugging only.
• EntryTypes implementation changed. The API doesn't change. Datatype StringTab is now local to symbols.c. Datatype Rule is now local to rewrite.c.

Version 2.42

• New selection operation introduced. The selection with regular expressions is complemented by a selection according to simple substrings. This selection is initiated with the new resource select.string which takes the same arguments as the resource select but does comparison for a substring instead of regular expression matching. The value of select.case.sensitive is taken into account but at runtime and not at specification time. Certain characters can be ignored for the comparison. Those are contained in the new string resource select.ignored.
• New resource print.entry.types introduced. This resource controlls the entry types and the order in which they are printed. In fact the macro printing facility is obsolete with this new resource.
• New resource clear.ignored.words introduced. In fact this is a function which deletes all ignored words. Thus it is possible to determine all ignored words at runtime--even the compiled in defaults.
• Bug fixed: selection honours the resource print.all.strings now.
• Makefiles slightly improved. Less manual adaption. Installation of all library files -- even on Solaris.
• Name formatting omission fixed: Translation and length are taken into account correctly. The new name format sign * has been introduced to denote the inheritance of the translation from the calling format.
• Restriction relaxed. Now it is possible to declare up to MAXINT entry types and not only 4096. The Record data structure and the associated macros have been modified slightly to accomplish this.
• Bug in the aux file selection mechanism fixed. This bug caused some cross referenced entries to be missing under special circumstances.
• Bug in key.c fixed which caused a crash because an initialization was missing under certain circumstances.
• Make target libbib.a added. This is known to work on UNIX. I would like to get feedback for other systems.
• Minor bug in names.c fixed.
• Minor bug in print.c fixed. print.wide.equal does not have exceptions any more.
• Minor bug in print.c fixed. Deleted fields are treated better.
• Bug in database.c fixed which caused macro expansion to fail under certain circumstances.
• BibTcl: bibtool format allows to use the full power of format specifications.
• BibTcl: bibtool sprint added which returns the formatted string representation of an entry.
• BibTcl: Bug in $rec set \$key ... fixed.
• Minor changes in the C interface (Just wait for the compiler or linker to complain about different arguments:-).

Version 2.41

• New boolean resource print.equal.right which controls whether the = in normal entries is aligned right or left.
• New boolean resource print.wide.equal which controlls whether the equal sign is surrounded by spaces even if the alignment forces a narrower layout.
• New boolean resource print.comma.at.end which controlls whether the comma between fields is printed at the end or at the beginning of a field/value pair.
• New boolean resource print.deleted.entries which controls the treatment of deleted entries. If this resource is true then delete entries are put as comments into the output. This is the old behavior and thus it is the default.
• Pseudo field sortkey added.
• Pseudo field source added which contains the filename the record has been read from or the empty string if this can not be determined.
• Makefile adapted to meet the description.
• configure creates ./config.h aswell.
• Strings can be either local to a database or global. The output of macros does include local macros only. This is a point of incompatibility with previous versions.
• Massive extensions to BibTcl.
• Cleaning of the sources and massive addition of documentation. Now the documentation of the C functions is present. Thus it becomes possible to use the BibTool routines to write C programs. BibTcl is a first application of this technique. Nevertheless a few changes seem possible before things are cut in stone.
• According to a suggestion by Oren Patashnik the term entry is used instead of record -- at least in the documentation.
• Minor bug in print.c fixed which caused looping when small values for line length and alignment column was given.
• Minor bugfix in key.c. The resource crossref.limit was off by 1.
• Some additions have been made to support new features in the forthcoming BibTeX 1.0. They do not really work right now but just restrict the accepted input files.
• Flag --with-kpathsea added to configure.

Version 2.40

• Sorting uses the new key instead of the old one as before. This has not been specified, but the new behaviour might be more intuitive.
• key.format=empty fixed. key.format short.need and long.need are aliases for new.short and new.long resp.
• Some error messages slightly improved.
• Minor print bug fixed: additional commas appeared when the last field was deleted.
• Typo in documentation: I had typed preserve.key instead of preserve.keys. Shame on me:-) Some additional examples in the documentation.
• Field deletetion completely covered by the rewriting mechanism. delete.field is kept for backward compatibility as an alias.

Version 2.39

• The default for the pattern in the select resource is now ".". Thus it is easier to select entries with a given type.
• New resource preserve.keys introduced. If this resource is on then key generation touches only entries with empty keys. The keys of other entries are left unchanged. Initially this resource is off.
• The disambiguation now respects the order of the entries. Previously it used the reverse order which was contra-intuitive.
• Formating names: Names connected by ~ or tight initials (A.U. Thor) are now treated better.
• Nasty little bug in the key specification parser fixed. This has (sometimes) let to a wrong evaluation of disjunctions. Minor bug in verbose messages fixed.
• AutoConf scripts added.

Version 2.38

• Format specifier %d enhanced. It can fail now if no number is found in the field. The minus sign means padding to a fixed length. The plus sign means not to fail but use 0. The post specifier can be used to select another but the first number. E.g. %.2d means to use the second number.
• Format specifier %D introduced. It acts like %d but does not truncate the number. Thus larger numbers are used completetly.
• Bug fixed. If the key format failed then the key was left empty. Now the default key is used as written in the documentation. Somehow the bugfix for the select statement has not made it into the last release. Now it should be in.
• Several mistakes in the documentation corrected.

Version 2.37

• kpathsea support for searching BibTeX files added.
• Bugs fixed: Searching/key generation combination and aux file evaluation.
• The distribution is now availlable in two forms: as a gzipped tar file and as a zip archive.

Version 2.36

• Added sample file for interfacing BibTool with Tcl: Tcl/bibtool.tcl
• Added sample file for interfacing BibTool with Perl: Perl/bibtool.pl
• Minor bug fix in string parsing routines. E.g. select from command line was not evaluated properly.
• Minor bug fixed. add.field now works again as described in the documentation.
• Minor bug fixed. Command line argument -r issued a warning when everything was ok.

Version 2.35

• Inheritance via crossref can be used to access fields in another entry when creating keys. E.g. this means that crossreferencing inproceedings can access the booktitle of the proceedings. The new resource crossref.limit restricts the number of crossrefs followed. E.g. 0 means do not follow crossrefs (as it has been in previous releases). The default is 32.
• New boolean resource check.do.delete introduced. If this resource is on then the double entries are not only preceeded by ### instead of @ but deleted completely.
• New boolean resource sort.macros introduced. If this is on then the macro definitions are sorted alphabetically. Default: on
• The handling of comments has been changed completely. Comments are now attached to the preamble/string/normal entry following them. Especially during sorting the comments are rearranged as well. This seems useful to keep comments on macro definitions and the definitions together. The last comment always stays at the end.
• Minor bug fixed. The searching for .bibtoolrsc went wrong.
• Minor bug fixed. output.file resource acted incorrect.
• print.all.strings acts like described in the documentation.
• Resource arguments in the command line can have unbalanced braces in strings now. Still there is no escape character defined.
• Internally BibTool can handle more than one database simultaneously. This is needed for the SQL interface. Let's see how this can be used otherwise.

Version 2.34

• Default value of key.expand.macros changed to on. This seems to be a more sensible default value. (Possible incomatibility to old version)
• new.format.type introduced. This command can be used to specify formatting rules for names. It is used in conjunction with the %p format specification which has been added.
• The format specifiers for counting names/words/characters have been added. Those act as booleans which force backtracking if they fail. The qualifier # is used to enable counting.
• When writing macro files undefined macros are written as _string instead of @STRING. Thus they are comments to BibTeX.
• The command line options -x and -X now also set print.all.strings to off. (This has no effect yet)
• The documentation has been updated.

Version 2.33

• Reference card added (prepared for A4 paper).
• Bug-fix in rewrite.c. add.field no longer crashes.
• Format specifiers %n and %N now also use the post argument. This argument is used to restrict the number of characters transferred.

Version 2.32

• New resource select.fields introduced. This resource controlls which fields are considered when selecting with -X.

Version 2.31

• I have moved to a new job. My email address has been changed in all files (maybe I have missed some?).
• The resource select.case.sensitive behaved contra-intuitive. This has been fixed. This means that old scripts might need adaption.
• select and rewrite.rule can take several fields now. Thus you can specify several selections or rewrites more compact.
• The survey of related programs in the documentation has been enlarged.

Version 2.30

• Minor bugfix in s_parse.c. Resource specifications in the command line may have let to an overflow of an array. This has been fixed.
• New resource print.parentheses introduced. This resource allows the user to specify whether {} or () should be used to delimit each entry.

Version 2.29

• Support for compilation without the GNU Regular Expression Library improved.
• The @comment is really more liberal than I thought. This prefix is simply ignored (As I have read in the BibTeX sources). This behaviour is now also performed by BibTool.

Version 2.28

• Some additional updates for the new makefiles.
• Bugfix in print.c which let to additional strings after the regular end of an entry.

Version 2.27

• Reorganization of the files. Slight corrections of function protptypes in various files. Change of the Makefile to support Amiga SAS/C.

Version 2.26

• Minor bug in key.c fixed. One step further to a 8-bit clean program. I wonder which 8-bit traps are still hidden in BibTool.
• The TeX macro mechnism has been enhanced to allow one to define single character macros. This means tex.define automatically makes a character active if it is encountered as macro name of a definition.

Version 2.25

• Finally all separators can be arbitrary strings. Only allowed characters are used (as it has been done in version 1.*). I hope this finally fixes the bug in key.c which I had troubles with in the previous versions.

Version 2.24

• Documentation for regular expressions added.
• Resource select and select.case.sensitive added. The selection allows to specify a regular expression for arbitrary fields. This subsumes the old extract.regex which is kept for backward compatibility.
• A bugfix in 2.23 corrected.

Version 2.23

• Some minor modifications for DEC-Alpha.
• Some minor modifications for the native HP C compiler.
• Some bugs in key.c fixed.

Version 2.22

• \par (double newlines) is preserved now. parse.c has been modified. The line breaking algorithm in print.c has been adapted.
• Allocation bug in stack.c fixed.
• Bug in expand.c which added garbage to expanded strings.
• Some improvements for non-ANSI C compilers (I really don't know why I continue this).

Version 2.21

• Preserving of case of keys introduced. For this purpose the resource preserve.key.case has been introduced. The management of the list of old keys is done in macros.c mainly. Minor change in print.c and parse.c.

Version 2.20

• Minor bug fix in sort.order.
• Compression method changed to gzip.

Version 2.19

• Key format specifiers t, w, W introduced. w, W, t and T take a post argument to limit the number of characters to use.
• sort.order introduced to sort fields in an entry.
• Wrong mail addresses in many files corrected.

Version 2.18

• Rewriting missed some multiply occurring patterns. (rewrite.c)
• Resource rewrite.limit added.
• Problem with recursive resources fixed. (parse.c)

Version 2.17

• The documentation is now compatible with LaTeX2e.

Version 2.16

• New resource print.newline introduced to control the number of empty lines between entries.
• MSDOS support: Imitating emtex search path initialization as option.

Version 2.15

• Some problems with 8-bit characters fixed.
• String expansion before key generation added: key.expand.macro
• Hashindex was computed wrong for some strings with ASCII values > 127.
• Hashtable enlarged and new algorithm for hashindex

Version 2.14

• delete.field bug fixed. The deletion of the last field lead to the deletion of all fields. (rewrite.c)
• Comments added to print.c
• Target zip in Makefile.

Version 2.13

• Yet more modifications for the MSDOS port.
• What a brain-dead OS.

Version 2.12

• Version 2.12 of GNU regex library integrated.
• alloca.c is no longer needed.
• Some improvements for the MSDOS port.
• aux.[ch] renamed to tex_aux.[ch]
• Resource search path seems to work now.

Version 2.11

• Some typos fixed.
• Redefinition of entry types enabled.

Version 2.10

• String/Macro expansion added: expand.macros
• Case in-sensitive treatment of ignored words.
• Some additional targets in Makefile.

Version 2.09

• Makefile enhanced.
• Error/verbose/debug messages improved.
• Hell, I forgot to remove trace statements.

Version 2.08

• Comment parsing and printing improved.
• symbol.type introduced.
• Minor improvement of non-ANSI support.

Version 2.07

• Printing improved. Rewriting of macro names completed and documented.
• Truncating bug in print.c fixed.
• Minor improvement of non-ANSI support.

Version 2.06

• UN*X man pages for sbuffer(), pxfile()
• Absolute path name use improved.
• Minor bug fixed.

Version 2.05

• Semantic checks with regular expressions.
• Crossref modification when key generation is enabled.
• Preference bug for search path building fixed.
• Rewriting enhanced.

Version 2.04

• String parser introduced. Error checking/messages improved.
• Undocumented command line options changed.
• Command line specification of resources introduced.
• Minor bug fixes.
• Code slightly reorganized. (I really found a static array)
• Samples directory renamed to Lib.

Version 2.03

• Field rewriting introduced.
• Resource optimize is obsolete. The functionality can be achieved by field rewriting.
• Resource search path introduced.

Version 2.02

• Minor bug fixes.
• Static array in key generation routine made dynamic.
• There is still a limit which can be reached when a short TeX macro expands into very long text.
• Checking double entries feature introduced.
• Printing TABs can be emulated by SPACEs.

Version 2.01

• Bug fixes.
• Print representation for items introduced.
• Distribution improved.
• Resource samples added.

Version 2.0

• Major revision.
• Sorting integrated.
• Resources introduced.
• Several command line options deleted.
• Key formatting improved.
• Draft Documentation.

Version 1.7