ietf2bibtex(1)

💖 ietf2bibtex — the manual page, bestie edition 💖

okay so you're looking at ietf2bibtex(1), from the General Commands Manual, and honestly? she's a little icon. let's get into it ✨

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🌸 NAME 🌸

ietf2bibtex — makes a BibTeX entry for an IETF document. that's it, that's the girl 🫶

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🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

ietf2bibtex [--quiet] [--verbose] [--authors-fix-file=NAME]
            [--no-authors-fix-file] document [document ...]

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

so bestie, here's the vibe: ietf2bibtex builds you a BibTeX entry for an IETF document — think RFC or Internet Draft, the whole situation. it doesn't make you hand-type anything, it just goes and grabs what it needs from online XML references and from the actual document itself. iconic behaviour, no cap 💅

but — and this is the important part — author names are sometimes wrong, misspelled, incomplete, or just flat-out inconsistent 😭 so because of that, ietf2bibtex can read a file called an authors fix file. it's full of name translations, and the format is "Old Name" "New Name", like this:

"A. Bundy"  "Al Bundy"
"J. Muller" "Joe Müller"
"J. Moller" "Jarle Møller"

💀 Known limitations of ietf2bibtex 💀

ngl, she has a few:

• IETF metadata and documents only contain ASCII characters. so to get the correct non-ASCII author names (German, Norwegian, French, etc. — you know the ones), you have to use authors-fix.list. there's no other way, fr fr.
• IETF metadata often has wrong or limited author info for a document. ietf2bibtex tries to pull the author information out of the document itself — but unusual formatting sometimes blocks her. 🙈
• IETF metadata often has the wrong date for a document. again, ietf2bibtex tries to get the date from the document — and again, unusual formatting sometimes prevents this. 😭

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👑 OPTIONS 👑

these are the arguments you can pass, bestie:

• document — the name of the IETF document. like RFC5351, or draft-dreibholz-mptcp-nornet-experience. you know the drill 💖
• --quiet — prints less progress info. she'll be chill about it 🤫
• --verbose — prints progress information. this one is the default, so she's chatty unless you tell her otherwise 💬
• --authors-fix-file=NAME — uses the file you name as the authors fix file. if you don't give her one, the default kicks in: it tries authors-fix.list in the current directory first, then /usr/share/doc/bibtexconv/examples/authors-fix.list. 🌈
• --no-authors-fix-file — uses no authors fix file at all. raw. unfiltered. 🫣

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🦋 EXAMPLES 🦋

look at her go ✨

ietf2bibtex RFC5351

ietf2bibtex RFC5351 RFC5352 RFC5353 RFC5354 RFC5355 RFC5356 RFC5525
        >RSerPool.bib

ietf2bibtex --quiet draft-dreibholz-mptcp-nornet-experience

ietf2bibtex --verbose --authors-fix-file=/usr/share/doc/bibtexconv/‐
        examples/authors-fix.list draft-dreibholz-rserpool-delay

fr fr, that last one wraps across two lines — it's one single command, don't let the line break gaslight you 💅

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🌟 the sign-off 🌟

this page is ietf2bibtex(1) from the General Commands Manual, dated April 29, 2025 — that's the source, the version, the whole moment. she ate and left no crumbs, periodt. 🎀💜🧚