PBIBTEX(1)

📦 version 2026.0, in alpine 3.24

🌸 NAME 🌸

okay so bestie, let me introduce you to pbibtex and upbibtex — they make a (Japanese) bibliography for (La)TeX. that's the whole vibe. 💖

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

pbibtex [options] auxname[.aux]

🎀 DESCRIPTION 🎀

pBibTeX (pbibtex) is a modified version of bibtex(1) that's built for handling Japanese bibliographies. the way it sorts entries? by code points in EUC-JP. and it also brings new + modified built-in functions, which I'm about to spill below. 💅

upBibTeX (upbibtex) is a modified version of pBibTeX, and it sorts entries by code points in Unicode instead. two icons, slightly different superpowers, no cap. 👑

🦋 Extensions to bibliography style (bst) functions

one brand-new built-in function has entered the chat, and a few others got a glow-up to make Japanese handling less of a struggle. ✨

  • is.kanji.str$ — [New built-in] pops the top (string) literal and peeks to see if it contains any non-ASCII characters. pushes 1 if it's got at least one, and 0 if it doesn't. simple as that. 🌈
  • substring$ — got modified so it won't chop a character string right in the middle of a multibyte character. rude behavior, cancelled. 🙅‍♀️
  • text.prefix$ — same kind of modification as substring$ got. matching energy. 💫
  • add.period$ — modified so it will not append "." after the Japanese punctuation marks that correspond to "!", "?" and "." — namely U+FF01, U+FF1F, U+3002 and U+FF0E. it knows better than to double up. 😌
  • format.name$ — modified to accept the Japanese zenkaku ideographic space (U+3000) for names displayed in Japanese. it also got modified to recognize Japanese commas (U+3001 and U+FF0C) similar to how "and" works between names. multi-tasking queen. 👑

💅 OPTIONS 💅

first things first: check out tex(1) for the deets on command-line parsing, and bibtex(1) for the common options — that's -min-crossrefs, -terse, -help, -version. 🫶

  • [-no]-guess-input-enc — disables/enables guessing of the input file encoding. let it guess or don't, your call bestie. 🔮
  • -kanji=string — sets the Japanese encoding. string is one of euc, jis, sjis, utf8, uptex. pick your fighter. ⭐
  • -kanji-internal=string — sets the Japanese internal encoding. string is one of euc or uptex. only two options here, keep it cute. 🎀

🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

👑 AUTHORS 👑

BibTeX was written by Oren Patashnik at Stanford University. iconic origin story fr. 🌟

the Japanese version of BibTeX was originally developed by Shouichi Matsui as JBibTeX until 1991. it was developed to behave consistently with NTT JTeX when handling legacy Japanese encodings. the old documentation files jbibtex.pdf, jbtxdoc.tex, jbtxhak.tex — all available in TeX Live btw — describe the Japanese handling capability and some additional notes of JBibTeX. 📚

current (u)pBibTeX is a forked version of JBibTeX, and it replaced the encoding conversion routine with one that's compatible with the (u)pTeX community edition using the ptexenc library. so heads up: the descriptions of encodings in the old documentation files j*.pdf — especially Section 3.3 of jbibtex.pdf, like BIBTERMCODE and BIBFILECODE — are no longer correct. don't trust them, bestie, they're giving expired info. 💀

this manual page was written by Hironobu Yamashita. 🫶

email bug reports to issue@texjp.org. tell them I sent you. 💌

and that's the whole page, pookie — brought to you by Web2C 2026, dated 12 January 2026. slay, go make some beautiful bibliographies. 💖✨🎀

📦 where this page comes from