Write HTML from biblatex

[tex-apprentice]

Is it possible to write HTML from biblatex?

I am aware of the SX question:

https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/89560/how-to-export-biblatex-data-to-html

which was prematurely closed just when @josephwright was suggesting a driver fot biblatex to output HTML and XML. This happened some 10 years ago ... so does such a driver exists now?

I am also aware of this method:

https://www.mail-archive.com/emacs-orgmode@gnu.org/msg133671.html

but that seems to be incredibly complex, specially since biblatex files seems to have all the information necessary. So, what would be the proper way to do this?

[moewew]

What is possible depends a lot on what exactly you have in mind when you say you want HTML from biblatex and what your use case is.

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If we're talking about generating biblatex output in HTML, this is surprisingly difficult.

biblatex is a LaTeX package, so unless you run LaTeX in a way that produces HTML output, the only way biblatex could produce HTML output is by writing an HTML file "on the side" during the LaTeX run. Then you run into the issues discussed in #292. You essentially would have to make everything expandable or at least make reasonable chunks expandable (and those chunks would have to interact properly with all of biblatex's advanced features like the punctuation buffer). In the current biblatex framework that is a huge ask and unlikely to happen without a major rewrite (though I can imagine that it would be possible to come up with something ad-hoc that works OK-ish enough for some simple applications).

An alternative would be to have LaTeX produce HTML output directly. Then biblatex could go on happily doing what it always does and LaTeX (or rather the "engine" you use to generate HTML from LaTeX code) would do the heavy lifting of producing the HTML output. That's more or less the make4ht route mentioned in your second link.

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If your aim is to just take your .bib file that is optimised for biblatex (i.e. uses some of the more modern field that are traditionally not used in classical BibTeX .bst styles) and get HTML output in any style (not necessarily a style available in the biblatex world), then my first intuition would be to look into CSL styles. There are various implementation of CSL and I'm guessing there are some out there that can read .bib file and produce HTML. Maybe they can be configured to accept more biblatex-y input if they don't already. Or you look into the many .bib to HTML converters that seem to be out there and see how they cope with your files. Again there might be a chance to have them accept more biblatex-y input depending on their actual implementation.

[tex-apprentice]

We are talking about the first possibility, which is the only one that produces the goodies of biblatex. After all when you see them, it is hard to "unsee". Thanks for the link to #292, it looks really interesting.

…

On Mon, Jun 20, 2022 at 10:38 PM moewew ***@***.***> wrote: What is possible depends a lot on what exactly you have in mind when you say you want HTML from biblatex and what your use case is. ------------------------------ If we're talking about generating biblatex output in HTML, this is surprisingly difficult. biblatex is a LaTeX package, so unless you run LaTeX in a way that produces HTML output, the only way biblatex could produce HTML output is by writing an HTML file "on the side" during the LaTeX run. Then you run into the issues discussed in #292 <#292>. You essentially would have to make everything expandable or at least make reasonable chunks expandable (and those chunks would have to interact properly with all of biblatex's advanced features like the punctuation buffer). In the current biblatex framework that is a huge ask and unlikely to happen without a major rewrite (though I can imagine that it would be possible to come up with something ad-hoc that works OK-ish enough for some simple applications). An alternative would be to have LaTeX produce HTML output directly. Then biblatex could go on happily doing what it always does and LaTeX (or rather the "engine" you use to generate HTML from LaTeX code) would do the heavy lifting of producing the HTML output. That's more or less the make4ht route mentioned in your second link. ------------------------------ If your aim is to just take your .bib file that is optimised for biblatex (i.e. uses some of the more modern field that are traditionally not used in classical BibTeX .bst styles) and get HTML output in any style (not necessarily a style available in the biblatex world), then my first intuition would be to look into CSL styles. There are various implementation of CSL and I'm guessing there are some out there that can read .bib file and produce HTML. Maybe they can be configured to accept more biblatex-y input if they don't already. Or you look into the many .bib to HTML converters that seem to be out there and see how they cope with your files. Again there might be a chance to have them accept more biblatex-y input depending on their actual implementation. — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#1231 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AZXFZ7OQPMLW5DBLIZVSNQDVQFILZANCNFSM5ZKP2J3Q> . You are receiving this because you authored the thread.Message ID: ***@***.***>