ctanbib(1)

📦 version 2026.0, in alpine 3.24

💖 ctanbib(1) 💖

okay so bestie, welcome to the ctanbib man page — the little cutie that lives in the ctanbib man page and goes and fetches bibliography info for you. it's giving ✨ librarian energy ✨ but make it CTAN.

🌸 NAME 🌸

ctanbib — retrieve bibliographic information for packages hosted on CTAN.

like. it gets you the citation. that's the whole vibe. 🎀

🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

ctanbib <options> [package name]

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

so this command retrieves bibliographic information for TeX packages hosted on CTAN, and it hands it to you in the BibTeX format. no cap. 💅

it looks up the Catalogue entry for each PKGNAME on CTAN (at https://ctan.org/xml/2.0/pkg/PKGNAME), and then converts the relevant info into a BibTeX entry. iconic behaviour honestly.

by default, the url field in the output entry is the package's home field value — if that's specified in the Catalogue entry. if it isn't, then https://ctan.org/pkg/PKGNAME is used instead. 🫶

👑 OPTIONS 👑

  • -c,--ctan — always use the CTAN /pkg/ url instead of the package homepage. main character move.
  • -C,--CTAN — use the package's CTAN path as the url (e.g.: /support/ctanbib).
  • -e,--entrytype — (default manual) change entry type.
  • -h,--help — print the help message.
  • -p,--pkgname — wrap the package name in a This command can be redefined in the document for the desired formatting.
  • -v,--version — print the version info.

🌈 EXAMPLES 🌈

okay bestie, watch this:

$ ctanbib latex

this invocation will print data in the BibLaTeX format to the standard output:

@manual{latex,
  title = {The Latex package},
  subtitle = {A TeX macro package that defines LaTeX},
  author = {Lamport, Leslie and The LaTeX Team},
  url = {http://www.latex-project.org/},
  urldate = {2018-08-23},
  date = {2018-04-01},
  version = {PL 5}
}

ate. 💅

now the --ctan option:

$ ctanbib -c hyperref

this produces a bib record with the @ctan type:

@ctan{hyperref,
title = {The Hyperref package},
subtitle = {Extensive support for hypertext in LaTeX},
author = {Rahtz, Sebastian and Oberdiek, Heiko},
url = {/macros/latex/contrib/hyperref},
urldate = {2018-08-27},
date = {},
version = {6.86b}
}

🧚 See also 🧚

see ctanbib-doc.pdf for more details. iykyk. 📄✨

💀 BUGS 💀

no known bugs. we stay winning. 😌

💜 AUTHOR 💜

Michal Hoftich (michal.h21@gmail.com) — king behaviour fr fr 👑

🎀 LICENSE 🎀

permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this software under the terms of the LaTeX Project Public License, version 1.3. 🫶

and that's the whole page, bestie!! this was version 0.2d, dated 25 Oct 2023, from the ctanbib man page — slay, go cite some packages 💖✨🎀🦋

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