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I want to make a poster in Inkscape and include the bibliography I have in .bib file. When I had only one item in the list, I just copied the text from generated pdf and manually formatted it (adding the italics etc.). But I can imagine that when there is a long list of references, copying and formatting gets tedious and error-prone.

For maths equations I convert the LaTeX code to SVG and I was wondering if the same can be done with bibliography? The downside of this solution is that the resulting SVG file won't let me format text anymore so I can't control the line breaking.

My question is - is there an easy way to generate the bibliography from .bib file and convert it to SVG or another format that will allow further text formatting?

Rabbit
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    It's not totally clear to me what you want to achieve. On the one hand you apparently do not want to format manually, but on the other hand you to to convert to to a format that "will allow further text formatting"? – Daniel Jun 10 '13 at 19:43
  • Maybe HTML is a useful intermediate format for you? That could be created easily with bib2html or similar tools. – Daniel Jun 10 '13 at 19:45
  • Depending on the time that is still available and your content, why not try instead to do the poster in LaTeX, not in Inkscape? There are document classes for posters... I would try this since you seem to have LaTeX sources for the rest of the material, too. – Count Zero Jun 10 '13 at 19:46
  • @Daniel I don't want to format the italics in every entry, but I want to control where the line-breaking is while I format the poster as a whole. But I see your point...;) – Rabbit Jun 10 '13 at 19:53
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    @CountZero Not too much time left and I am not an expert in LaTeX. But for the next poster this would be probably the best solution. – Rabbit Jun 10 '13 at 19:57
  • Check out if a combination of LaTeX+dvisvgm suits your needs. In case of problems with fonts use dvisvgm -n option, which includes text as glyph paths. – g.kov Jun 10 '13 at 20:23

1 Answers1

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Since Inkscape can load PDF files, first render only the bibliography exactly as you want with pdflatex (without number of page, headers, etc).

Then simply load the generated file to Inkscape. Group (Ctrl-G) all the text elements to maintain the format, copy the new object and paste in your poster.

enter image description here

Note that you can check an option to convert fonts names to a "similar" font available. That will change/ruin the format, but you can maintain the names and later change the font as usual in text boxes of svg files. To avoid font changes due to fonts that are unavailables for Inkscape, instead of pdflatex use XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX with a available true type system font. A MWE using the Arial like Umpush: 

\documentclass[english]{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont[Ligatures=TeX]{Umpush} 
\usepackage{babel}
\begin{document}
\bibliographystyle{plain}
\nocite{*}
\bibliography{borra}

\end{document}

MWE

The following example do not import well the font Arial since the "J" render a right space, but this seem only a specific font problem of this font:
MWE

But even with a more exotic font like Anaktoria the import just looks well:

MWE

Fran
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  • Good idea. Unfortunately after the import the fonts got really messy, some letters are overlapping and the italic type is not recognized at all - instead some other font is used. – Rabbit Jun 10 '13 at 20:37
  • @Rabbit. See the updated answer. – Fran Jun 10 '13 at 21:00
  • Or you can try the tool pdf2svg, it will turn the fonts into svg paths. See e.g. this answer: http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/74915 – matth Jun 10 '13 at 21:36
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    The advantage of maintain as text instead as paths is you still can do some changes. And probably this result also in a lighter file. For a complex poster perhaps this does matter. – Fran Jun 10 '13 at 21:44