Beastie – an experimental processor for BibTeX and friends

This is (a first cut at) a BibTeX processor.

Beastie is an experiment in supporting a decent language for processing BibTeX bibliographies (by which I mean a language which isn't the .bst language, which I enjoy, but only for rather perverse reasons; and by which I mean more specifically Scheme). As a functionality goal, it also implements the .bst language, showing that it is at least as functional as that language.

The goals of this project are:

• to explore ways of processing .bib files which aren't exclusively based on .bst;
  • to provide a second implementation of the BST language; and
  • to initiate some sort of conversation about BibTeX standards, broadly construed.

The first and second of those points aim to get away from BibTeX being a single-implementation system, where the only thing that can reliably process a .bib file is the bibtex program. This isn't quite the case at present, but combined with the third documentation point, it's quite hard to process BibTeX input in a confident way.

As far as the .bst language is concerned, it aims to support it quite fully, in the sense that it will produce the same resuls as BibTeX, for the standard styles. However it doesn't support it slavishly, and there are some deviations noted in doc/beastie.md. It also aims to slightly improve .bst error reporting, and adds a couple of extra .bst builtin functions, in both cases with the aim of being useful for debugging or developing .bst files (eg, printf$$).

The tool depends on both flex and Bison 2 or 3. Building from a checkout additionally requires autoconf. These are apt, yum and FreeBSD pkg packages flex, bison and autoconf; as of Debian 12, RHEL 9, and FreeBSD 13, these are Bison3 in all cases. On macOS, flex and Bison2 come as stock. The tool will use kpsewhich if a suitable TeX installation is in the path.

To build from a distribution, you need only do

./configure
make check

(we require GNU Make). You can provide a --without-kpse option to ./configure to suppress use of the kpselib library (if it's present), and provide --with-icu[=path] to give the path to the ICU library, if it's present and not found by default; or add --without-icu to suppress it. In Debian/apt terms, you'll need to install apt-get install gcc autoconf flex bison libicu-dev for a complete build from a repository checkout; in RedHat/dnf terms, that's dnf install autoconf flex bison libicu-devel; from a distribution, you won't need autoconf.

There's also a very simple make install target (respects a --prefix=$HOME/local argument to ./configure) and a comprehensive make check target. The distributed tarball contains a source set slightly different from the repository source (it includes generated documentation, and omits configure.ac). It should be suitable for simple hacking on the source, if necessary, but it would probably be better to go to the repository and check out the source. The makefile also includes a few standalone (and only semi-supported) lexers, so that, for example, lex-authors or lex-bib2 will produce the stream of lexemes the program consumes from an author string or a .bib file (as a curiosity, or for debugging).

To build from a checkout, preface the above with ./bootstrap (this requires that autoconf and autoheader be in the path).

See the file doc/beastie.md (or doc/beastie.xhtml in a distribution) for some btx anomalies (cases where the btxhak documentation seems a little peculiar), some beastie deviations from BibTeX behaviour, and a pointer to notes and tools from Nelson Beebe. To read the manpage, either install Beastie, or man doc/beastie.1.

The Scheme implementation I use is the fine s7 mini-Scheme, from ccrma.stanford.edu (see ./beastie -V for the precise version). Thanks to Bill Schottstaedt for creating s7, and for advice on some of its intricacies.

There are some examples in the directory examples/.

The program is copyright Norman Gray, and distributed under the terms of the 2-clause BSD licence. See the file LICENCE.txt for details. The exception is the pair of files s7.c and s7.h, which are copyright Bill Schottstaedt, and released under the terms of the ‘BSD zero-clause’ licence.

• Home page: https://purl.org/nxg/dist/beastie
  • Version: 0.14.1
  • Date: 2026 August 02

Plans

Things to do...

...maybe sometime/never:

• Clearer warning when an entry type has no style-file definition (BibTeX is noisy about this, beastie isn't).
  • In author lists or titles, handle 'text {TexT}' to suppress case-folding of bracketed text. This is partly done, but is part of a slightly longer project to abstract the handling here, to make it easier to generate non-TeX outputs. Possibly consider also normalising of whitespace?
  • Prettyprint the .bst parse tree, and reimplement urlbst by shaking that tree.
  • Investigate .csl?
  • Output: maybe produce LaTeX by producing HTML and formatting that: (em "foo") -> "\emph{foo}". Cute idea, probably unnecessary.
  • Markdown: support indented/literal code in itemized lists (I've just never got around to this); any other significant deviations from the Gruber spec? (apart from literal HTML, which is probably a bit of a project). I have an interesting experiment on a branch.

See the release notes.

Norman Gray https://nxg.me.uk

SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2023 Norman Gray https://nxg.me.uk SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-2-Clause