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I want to convert a bibtex citation into a human readable citation to paste into my editor. That is all.

A solution that I found makes use of bibtex2html, which is fine.

However, this needs bibtex to be installed. (Not BibDesk, not biber, nor MacTeX, nor biblatex) and I don't seem to be able to able to find this in homebrew, and it is not discussed on this page (https://www.bibtex.org/Links/).

How do I install bibtex on a Mac?

Att Righ
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  • Do you have Texlive/Mactex installed? If so... Otherwise, the best way to do it is to use something like Zotero and find the link to the citation. If there aren't many of those, it's quite fast. – user574859 Jul 20 '23 at 14:49
  • @user574859 Yeah I've got mactex installed (took a while to download) but bibtex is not on my path :/. Yeah, I guess I should add that, I'm doing this to quickly turn (arxiv) links into citations - so I want to do this from the command line. I looked into zotero but it doesn't seem to be easily scriptable. – Att Righ Jul 20 '23 at 14:53
  • Yes, Zotero works in this case for a couple of citations. It seems you've got a whole database, though. A workaround would be to use Overleaf and copy-paste the whole thing. – user574859 Jul 20 '23 at 15:01
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    pandoc can do this trick (and a gazillion more) – DG' Jul 20 '23 at 15:11
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    Welcome to TeX.se. If you have installed MacTeX you should definitely have bibtex (and biber) and all of the other standard binaries in TeX Live installed. And it should have set up the paths properly. Did you restart the Terminal after installing? – Alan Munn Jul 20 '23 at 17:25
  • I did not... but creating a new terminal seems to have fixed this. Interesting.

    I'm used to being able to immediately use a terminal program in the same shell, so I've document this in my own answer to the quesiton rather than deleting.

     – Att Righ Jul 20 '23 at 18:49
  • Since the TeX binaries are installed in /Library/TeX/texbin that path is part of your path until you login again. – Alan Munn Jul 20 '23 at 19:09
  • @AlanMunn 'not'. – cfr Dec 18 '23 at 06:08

1 Answers1

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Answering my own question.

You can install mactex with brew install mactex. But bibtex will only be on your path after you start a new terminal. I needed to create a completely new terminal tab / window (not just a new shell within a terminal).

bibtex was located here: /Library/TeX/texbin/bibtex.

Att Righ
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