A terrible little hack to integrate BibTeX into Markdown in a way that is independent of the Markdown parser.
Requires IO::File, BibTeX::Parser, and Text::Unidecode, all available from CPAN. For help installing these, you may want to consult this page. You should install these as root to give system-wide access to the modules.
Once these modules have been installed, you should be able to run the script as-is, with no special caveats.
To make a citation in your Markdown, use the syntax:
\cite{key}
...where key is the BibTeX key of the citation.
Once you've added your citations, you can run the script like so:
$ perl apply_references.pl list.bib input.md.ref output.md...where the parameters are:
list.bib: A bibtex file holding all your bibtex information.input.md.ref: An input Markdown file, possibly containing\cite{some_bibtex_key}entries.output.md: An output Markdown file, where the\cite{some_bibtex_key}entries have been converted to normal Markdown/HTML.
If there are \cite{some_bibtex_key} entries in the input file, the script will add a special "References" section to the end, if it's not already there. It is sensitive to the name of the section; it expects "## References". References will be put in order by author's names, titles, and years in the typical fashion. In the text, the citation will be shown as [num], where num refers to which citation in the references it is. Each of these citations also acts as an html anchor; you can click on them to immediately go to the corresponding citation.
Given that the input Markdown files are Markdown + the special \cite{some_bibtex_key} entries, you should distinguish these somehow. Personally I use the extension .md.ref. I also use a makefile that calls apply_references.pl for each input .md.ref file, producing normal Markdown (.md) files.
Depending on what source you're looking at, at least one of the following is true about Markdown:
- It only supports ASCII
- It has some limited unicode support
- It has mostly full unicode support
- It has full unicode support
This is a relevant issue when it comes to putting BibTeX information into Markdown files, since BibTeX can encode things that are only representable correctly in unicode. Given that unicode support is ultimately a Markdown parser issue, and that this script is intended to be independent of the Markdown parser used, I've opted to go with the lowest common denominator: convert any BibTeX information to pure ASCII.
Overall, not a lot of it has been done. It works for me and my use case, but we all know how that works.