Convert back from biblatex to bib

Hi, after cleaning up my bib file from bibtex to biblatex format, I’d like to go back. It’s causing a lot of trouble with my collaborators who do not use biblatex, and continue to use natbib. Is there a tool that converts back my bib file back from biblatex format?

Sadly this is not possible at the moment but we have it on our radar. For now, you have to use replace & find of your favorite text editor to revert the biblatex fields like journaltitle back to bibtex journal (and dates are a bit harder).

Forget my previous message. It was easier to implement a proper solution than you fiddling around with find & replace. The “convert to BibTeX” functionality is now in the pipeline and will be (hopefully) included in version 4.1, which will be released in a few days (around Christmas). I would love to give you a link to the preview version so that you can directly try it out, but we have troubles at the moment with our build system so need to be a bit patient.

I looked through the code a little bit, and it’s a bit hard to figure out exactly what the cleanup script is changing.

  1. There is some ordering change in the fields. This is irrelevant.
  2. journal -> journaltitle
  3. year -> date (in the correct format)

Is there anything else that is changed? If these are the only things, I’ll find/replace with regexp.

Yes, essentially that’s it. For the conversation in the other direction, all new fields like journaltitle are converted to the old ones (journal) and, moreover, the date is split into year/month and stored in the corresponding fields.If you have some experience with git, you can also checkout my branch and build the new version locally.

I built it and ran it. It works pretty well from what I can tell. There were some inversion errors: going from bibtex -> biblatex -> bibtex doesn’t quite work, but I could figure out a minimal example. One bibtex entry that it seemed to have trouble with was this:

@article {MR0062127,
    AUTHOR = {Frame, J. S. and Robinson, G. de B. and Thrall, R. M.},
     TITLE = {The hook graphs of the symmetric groups},
   JOURNAL = {Canadian J. Math.},
  FJOURNAL = {Canadian Journal of Mathematics. Journal Canadien de
              Math\'ematiques},
    VOLUME = {6},
      YEAR = {1954},
     PAGES = {316--324},
      ISSN = {0008-414X},
   MRCLASS = {20.0X},
  MRNUMBER = {0062127},
MRREVIEWER = {D. E. Littlewood},
}

Maybe my bibtex file is too messed up now to fix all of these errors.

For me this entry works perfectly well and the round-trip bibtex -> biblatex -> bibtex produces exactly the same item. Can you please describe in more detail what your problems are. Thanks!

The biblatex -> bib conversation is now included in the latest development version. If you still have problems or have suggestions for further improvements, please open a new issue at github.