New Software Project: refer-styles

May 20, 2021

Dealing with citations can become difficult as one gathers more and more resources and publications of different formats. The groff document formatting system that is included by default in most Linux distributions is a very simple and powerful tool. refer is a preprocessor for Groff which automatically generates bibliographic references, but it does not offer the best functionality when it comes to working with strict guidelines and formatting rules regarding citations.

I started this project while I was writing my thesis in my final year at university, and ended up relying on it for the final version of my thesis, which was written entirely in groff. At the moment, it is a modest collection of custom citation styles for the groff and the refer preprocessor. In-text citations and end references are generated in accordance with the preferred style.

Supported citation styles: APA, MLA.
Supported groff macro packages: ms, me.

This Github Link contains the necessary files and a comprehensive manual for formatting academic citations with refer-styles.