Tutorial: Output Plugins

Output Plugins

There are several ways to extend output. First of all, if you want to add citation styles or other locales for your citations, you can use output_plugins_csl. CSL Plugins themselves are configurations of the CSL Output Plugin. General Output PLugins, used to add different formats (like BibTeX, Bib.TXT, BibJSON, etc.) can also be added. To extend most Output Plugins, you can add Dictionary Plugins.

Output Plugins

Output plugins can be added like this:

Cite.plugins.output.add(type, formatter)

Or with General Plugins, ref being the plugin name:

Cite.plugins.add(ref, {
  output: {
    type: formatter
  }
})

Options

Option Description
type Format name
formatter Formatter

type

Any string. Descriptive would be nice.

formatter

A function taking in an array of CSL-JSON, returning the product. Can use dictionaries, mentioned below. The signature is like below:

formatter (csl[] data, ...options) {}

So the first argument is an array of CSL data, and then there are any number of configuring arguments. Usually only one is needed, but multiple are supported. Multiple options can be passed like this:

cite.format('example', optionA, optionB)

Standard formatter options

Most Output Plugins share some common options.

  • The format (and possibly the type) options control the formatting language, e.g. HTML, plain text or RTF. How this is achieved (i.e. with or without Dictionary Plugins) is your choice.
  • The entry option, if applicable, controls which entries get outputtted.