Writing a proposal and need to shrink your bibliography? bibchen is here to help!
First, clone the respository somewhere and cd into the directory. Then if you're using a .bashrc file run this in the therminal.
$ echo 'alias bibchen="python $PWD/bibchen.py"' >> ~/.bashrc
$ bashFrom anywhere you should be able to run:
$ bibchen path/to/file.texwhich will use by default PDFLaTeX and bibtex to generate the final PDF without altering your manuscript file.
There are multiple format options which you can use to change the style of your bibliography. The most commonly used options would be
$ bibchen path/to/file.tex -fontsize [footnotesize]where [footnotesize] is any defined fontsize. You can also change the title of the bibliography through
$ bibchen path/to/file.tex -title [References]where [References] will be used for the title. The default is 'References'. Finally you can change symbol used to separate the references with the -symbol argument,
$ bibchen path/to/file.tex -symbol [cdot]which accepts any mathematical symbol (without the preceding forward slash) to be used to separate references.
A full list of the formatting options can be found through the -h argument,
$ bibchen -hSometimes the code appears to hang up and get stuck. This is likely an issue with PDFLaTeX finding an error in the TeX file, for example a misplaced '$' sign. To check for this, run in verbose mode,
$ bibchen path/to/file.tex --verbosewhich will spit out all the information and allow you to continue with the complication by ignoring the errors.
A failure might occur if you do not have PDFLaTeX or bibtex commands available via the command line. Check that your PATH points to the right location. For some older MacOS versions, an update might have changed this (for example).
A good first try would be something like:
$ echo 'export PATH="$PATH:/Library/TeX/Root/bin/x86_64-darwin/"' >> ~/.bashrcA typical bibliography using the natbib approach gives something like this:
But when you run bibchen, you get something like this:
