Re: [Tip] Export a bibliography to HTML with bibLaTeX and make4ht

[Gustavo Barros <gusbrs.2016@gmail.com>]

Hi Juan,

that's very interesting.  Thanks for sharing.

On Sat, 23 Jan 2021 at 12:03, Juan Manuel Macías <maciaschain@posteo.net> wrote:

> When I export to LaTeX an Org document that contains a bibliography, I
> use bibLaTeX with a very custom style (i.e. quite a few lines of code
> related to bibLaTeX in the preamble). I wanted to apply all that
> bibLaTeX setting and styles when exporting to HTML too, so I came up
> with this method, using make4ht. I share it here, in case it is useful
> to someone.
>
> The idea is to compile with make4ht (see:
> https://www.ctan.org/pkg/make4ht) a simple file with *only* the
> bibliography, and "embed" the HTML output in the Org document. You need
> to create in the working directory a tex file, which will serve as a
> minimal preamble and which also includes all code related to bibLaTeX.
> We can name it preamble.tex, and it would start like this:

Indeed, when one actually needs biblatex-biber to process their
bibliography, using Org is really hard.  I have some history with this
problem, as I initially approached Emacs (once upon a time) trying to
use Org as a single source and multiple outputs (mainly pdf and odt).
However, as you, I rely on heavily customized styles, which simply won't
work with pandoc/CSL, so I got stuck.  I eventually stayed in Emacs and
use Org for a number of things, but for my more formal writing use
AUCTeX + RefTeX, which is great too (alas, no odt..., at least not
easily).

For a long time I fancied trying something about it, pretty much in the
same lines as you are doing here.  My idea was to use `preview-latex'
for this, which I still think is promising and, as far as I understand,
pretty much automates what you are doing, which is to generate a
stripped document, with a proper preamble, and run it on a piece of your
actual document.  It is used by AUCTeX and LyX (Org too, I presume) to
generate images, but I don't see why it could not be streamlined to
generate a dvi which could then be fed to tex4ht and friends, just as
you do too.  I thought that this procedure could, in principle, be used
to export to other formats, but also to Org itself, generating either a
second version of the source document with the citations and
bibliography already processed as text (sort of a
'org-biblatex-citeproc'), or as a preview, such as the ones for math.
Depending on how far you are willing to take your setup, this might be
one path.  It should handle two limitations of your procedure, which
are: getting the bibliography with the entries actually cited in the
document and citation callouts.  The first one is easy to handle in your
current approach by means of any of the multiple alternatives to
generate a bib file with only the cited entries.  The second one, much
harder, as far as I can see.

To my dismay, my own style customizations for biblatex are mainly aimed
at citations (primary/archival sources for Economic History).  But it
was quite interesting to see your approach here.  So, again, thank you.

Best,
Gustavo.