addbib

An opinionated cli app that adds a linked bibliography to markdown documents, where the links are realised with html.

For available commands, please run addbib --help.

This app is not designed for production use, but for a personal need in wanting linked citations in my Zettelkasten that is composed of markdown files.

Please always backup your markdown files, and test with --dryrun, before using the app on any markdown.

Usage

The intention for this app is to be part of a pipeline that generates html pages from markdown notes.

An example scenario would be a folder of markdown files (for instance a Zettelkasten), where each markdown file is intended to generate a html page. Some example apps that convert markdown files to html pages are quartz and mkdocs. This app will add a bibliography to the markdown files, where in-text citations will be replaced with internal html links, which direct the user to the related bibliography item at the end of the markdown file. The links are realised with html.

In more explicit terms, given a .md, .bib and .csl file, the app adds a linked bibliography to the end of the markdown file, and inserts html into the markdown file to realise this. Please note, that the .csl file is only used to format the bibliography, not the citations. The citations are always numbered and are always presented in square brackets.

Valid markdown citation keys (that the app will find) are those that start with the @ symbol, and/or closed within square brackets, for instance:

• @Author2025
• [@Author2025]
• [@AuthorOne2025, @AuthorTwo2025, ..]

There are various options in using the app, such as:

• not producing any html links (--nohtml) where only the bibliography and numbered citations are added,
• output to different files (-o, --output) instead of overwritting the markdown file,
• or simply perform a --dryrun that not change anything, and show all changes that would have occurred in the terminal.

Installation

cargo install addbib

Contributions

Contributions are more than welcome!

I suspected the most wanted change would be to allow the csl file to style the citation keys. I will see to adding this feature if there's interest from others. I would also document the code, and organise the repository better in general.

Licence

addbib is licensed under the EUPL-1.2 or later. You may obtain a copy of the licence at https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/eupl-text-eupl-12. A copy of the EUPL-1.2 licence in English is given in LICENSE.txt which is found in the root of this repository.