The Style API of Pybtex

Template language

BibTeX users probably know that it has a simple stack oriented language for defining bibliography styles. That is what is placed inside of .bst files. For a Pythonic bibliography processor it is natural to use Python for writing styles. Pybtex style file is just a Python module containing several functions with names like format_article, format_book, etc. Every function takes a bibliography entry as an argument and returns a formatted bibliography entry:

def format_article(entry):
    return 'Article %s' % entry.fields['title']

To make things easier we designed a simple template language:

from pybtex.template import field, join, optional

def format_article(entry):
    template = join (' ') [
        'Article',
        field('title'),
        'by',
        field('author'),
        optional [', ', field('pages')],
        '.'
    ]
    return template.format(entry)

Rich text

Pybtex was designed to produce output in multiplt formats. It means that bibliograhy formatting functions can't just return things like \emph{editor} or <i>journal</i>. We have a simple language for producing formatted text:

>>> from pybtex.richtext import Text, Tag
>>> from pybtex.backends import latex
>>> renderer = latex.Writer()
>>> text = Text('This is an example of a ', Tag('emph', 'rich'), ' text.')
>>> print text.render(renderer)
This is an example of a \emph{rich} text.

Is that all?

More documentation will be written when our style API gets some form. Use the source for now.