PHphiresky·Jan 26, 2024Submission
Pandoc-url2cite: Automatically generate and manage citations from URLs
2 points · Open discussionphiresky
pandoc-url2cite
TypeScript2019–2024
phiresky / pandoc-url2cite
pandoc-url2cite
Effortlessly and transparently add correctly styled citations to your markdown paper given only a URL
3Distinct people
6Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
128GitHub stars
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What it is
Effortlessly and transparently add correctly styled citations to your markdown paper given only a URL
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Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
Markdown actually works great for larger documents when you use it with pandoc [1]. That way you get HTML output and PDF output via Latex, without the HTML being a second class…
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
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HN mentions by year6 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2019-12-14 18:38:55 UTC to 2024-01-26 10:10:32 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
6 sourcesMarkdown actually works great for larger documents when you use it with pandoc [1]. That way you get HTML output and PDF output via Latex, without the HTML being a second class citizen.
I wrote my thesis (50 pages) and multiple published papers this way. Maybe it seems janky but honestly my experience with Latex and it's 10 incompatible compilers and thousands of semi-incompatible packages has been much worse.
I also don't understand why (academic) publishing is so PDF focused. It's a horrible format to read on screens (think multi-column PDFs, and scrolling / jumping up and down to find references), and who actually prints stuff anymore?
The thing I love most about Pandoc is that my notes can just slowly turn into a fully fledged document. Like bullet points - The syntax in Latex is far too verbose to make taking notes with it comfortabl
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e.
It's also much easier to extend, I wrote a simple tool that automatically converts URLs into full and correctly formatted citations, so I don't even need a citation manager to get the same results:
The GAN was first introduced in [@gan](https://papers.nips.cc/paper/5423-generative-adversarial-nets).
Turns into https://github.com/phiresky/pandoc-url2cite/blob/master/exam...
Another great project with similar structure is Manubot [3], though the PDFs there are not generated by LaTeX.
[1]: https://pandoc.org/
[2]: https://github.com/phiresky/pandoc-url2cite
[3]: https://manubot.org/
Correctly styled citations to your Markdown paper given only a URL
3 points · Open discussionYeah, filters are great. Writing filters is easy: Pandoc basically converts the input document into a universal AST (json), and a filter is just any program that takes this json as an input and outputs a modified json AST.
I wrote a filter that automatically converts URL citstions in markdown to "real" citations in any style you want - very useful for writing papers without fighting with bibtex and managing bibliographies manually: https://github.com/phiresky/pandoc-url2cite
In Pandoc – A universal document converterFTR, Direct ink to raw `Source README.md`[0] is correct, but direct link to `Result README.pdf`[1] should be corrected.
Should be: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/phiresky/pandoc-url2cite/m...
[0] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/phiresky/pandoc-url2cite/m...
[1] https://github.com/phiresky/pandoc-url2cite/blob/master/READ...
In Show HN: Url2cite: Transparently convert links to citations in markdown papersEach citation is added to a formatted JSON file when it is first seen. After this it stays the same. This means you can fix the citation data by hand by just editing the JSON file. You should include the JSON file in your version control. An example is here [1]
Of course this might not be as comfortable as a GUI editor like Zotero, but I think I still prefer doing some small tweaks to a JSON file vs. the problems I've had in the past with Zotero exporting. The auto-export didn't always work consistently, and Zotero has many features that I don't need at all that make the whole thing more complex and fragile. Even collections are somewhat confusing to work with - I've often added citations to the wrong collection because it always adds to the currently open one, and then had to spend time to find it again. You also can't know which referen
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ces are actually used and which aren't.
And I pretty much always gave up as soon as someone else needs to work on the same paper, which then leads to managing the .bib file by hand anyways.
[1]: https://github.com/phiresky/pandoc-url2cite/blob/master/exam...