carta
bibtex8(1)

bibtex81

8-bit big bibtex

Usage

bibtex8 [options] aux-file

Overview

BibTeX8 is an 8-bit implementation of BibTeX written in C. It has been enhanced by adding the following features:

- "big" (32-bit) and customisable capacity

- flexible support for non-English languages using 8-bit character sets

BibTeX8 accepts 8-bit characters in its input files, and writes 8-bit characters to its output files. The character set is defined by an external configuration file --- the Codepage and Sort order ("CS") file. By default, it reads a specific CS file "88591lat.csf", which defines ISO 8859-1 character set and its alphabetical sorting order including accented characters.

Options

-? --help

display some brief help text.

-7 --traditional

operate in the original 7-bit mode, no CS file used. Only 7-bit ASCII characters are supported, and they are sorted by ASCII code value.

-8 --8bit

force 8-bit mode, no CS file used. All 8-bit characters (code > 127) are treated as letters, and they are sorted by their code value.

-c --csfile FILE

read FILE as the BibTeX character set and sort definition file. Note that options -7, -8 and -c are exclusive.

-d --debug TYPE

report debugging information. TYPE is one or more of all, csf, io, mem, misc, search.

-s --statistics

report internal statistics.

-t --trace

report execution tracing.

-v --version

report BibTeX version.

-B --big

set large BibTeX capacity.

-H --huge

set huge BibTeX capacity.

-W --wolfgang

set really huge BibTeX capacity for Wolfgang.

-M --min_crossrefs ##

set min_crossrefs to ##.

--mcites ##

allow ## \cites in the .aux files (deprecated).

--mentints ##

allow ## integer entries in the .bib databases (deprecated).

--mentstrs ##

allow ## string entries in the .bib databases (deprecated).

--mfields ##

allow ## fields in the .bib databases (deprecated).

--mpool ##

set the string pool to ## bytes (deprecated).

--mstrings ##

allow ## unique strings.

--mwizfuns ##

allow ## wizard functions (deprecated).

8BIT latin letters support

BibTeX8 supports extended features to handle 8bit latin letters. Several built-in functions in bibliography styles are enhanced as follows.

&

Pops the top two (integer) literals and pushes their bitwise AND.

|

Pops the top two (integer) literals and pushes their bitwise OR.

chr.to.int$, int.to.chr$

The function is the same as original BibTeX but 8bit characters are accepted.

width$

The function is the same as original BibTeX but letters of Latin-1 are supported.

History

  • Arch Linux 2026-11-01 to Debian 13 (Trixie): the text shown here
  • Debian 12 (Bookworm)
  • Debian 11 (Bullseye)
  • Debian 10 (Buster) to Debian 4.0 (Etch)

Authors

BibTeX8 was written by Niel Kempson and Alejandro Aguilar-Sierra. It is currently maintained as part of TeX Live.

This manpage was written for TeX Live, based on the work by Norbert Preining for Debian GNU/Linux.

From texlive-doc 2026.1-1 in Arch Linux 2026-11-01. Parsed by carta from the page's man source.