Generate plain text from bibtex file and bst style

Question

I have two files:

• entries.bib - file with bibtex formatted entries,
• nature.bst - file with bibliography style

Is there a way to generate plain text citations from these files using command line tools?

Answer 1

You could run latex2rtf or tex4ht on a tex file like this:

\documentclass{minimal}
\bibliographystyle{nature}
\begin{document}
\nocite{*}
\bibliography{entries}
\end{document}

There’re also BibHTML, BibTeX2HTML, bib2ML, bib2html.sh, bib2XHTML and probably more direct convertors that I have no experience with.

You will hardly find a script that converts to plain text directly, because most bibliography style include italic formatting, some also small caps or bold face, which are not available in plain text, but need rich text (RTF), HTML or something similar. You can easily copy and paste the results into a plain text editor, though, or adapt the scripts (since some are reasonably simple or flexible).

Answer 2

A simple method is to use bibtex2html and w3m for the final conversion to plain text. An example which produces compact formatting is given below:

bibtex2html -labelname -a -nodoi -nokeywords -noheader -nofooter -s ./custom.bst -o - ./bibliography.bib | w3m -T text/html -dump > output.txt