Extra fields

In some cases the Zotero fields do not offer a place to enter the data you need to get your exported entries just right. For this Zotero has a so-called “cheater syntax” which allows you to add extra “fields” as separate lines in the extra field all items in Zotero have. These fields are supported by the citation processor inside Zotero, and BBT understands them too, and adds one “cheater syntax of its own.

You can add such fields by adding each on their own line in the following format:

Label: value

or the older format you migh have seen, which is supported but considered depracated:

{:csl-variable: value}

The full list of labels and the Zotero/CSL variables they translate to can be found in the table at the end.

These extra-fields are available to postscripts as extra.kv.<variable-name>. Which variable it is depends (sorry):

• when you export to CSL, it is attempted to map it to the corrsponding CSL fields; if none are available, it is available under their zotero name
• when you export to Better BibTeX/Better BibLaTeX, it is attempted to map it to the corresponding zotero fields; if none are available, it is available under their csl variable name

There’s three type of fields:

• text
• date
• name

Text is just that. For dates, BBT will do its darndest to parse the crazy dates so many people seem intent in using but if you want consistent results, stick to YYYY-MM-DD. For names, use either just text (equivalent to a single-part name in Zotero), or <family name> || <given name>.

BBT-specific

There is also a BBT-specific extra-field format that looks like

tex.field: value

These fields are simply copied to the output by BBT, so if you have

tex.bestfield: philosophy

you will end up with

  bestfield = {philosophy}

in the written bib(la)tex.

You can make BBT export the field only for bibtex or biblatex by changing the prefix to bibtex. (so bibtex.bestfield:) or biblatex. respectively. Finally, you can use = instead of : as a delimiter, and that will indicate to BBT that what follows the = is “raw LaTeX”; BBT will not do any escaping and just copy it out unchanged. This means, for example, that you would probably want

tex.corp: Black & Decker
tex.formula= $\sum\limits_{i=1}^{n} -p(m_{i})\log_{2}(p(m_{i}))$

and not

tex.corp= Black & Decker
tex.formula: $\sum\limits_{i=1}^{n} -p(m_{i})\log_{2}(p(m_{i}))$

BBT will apply case-protection rules for non-raw fields by including capitals in the prefix, eg

TeX.corp: Black & Decker

It is important to note that these BBT-specific fields are not recognized by any other exporter. They might end up in notes for some other exporters; there’s nothing I can do about that.

Label/variable list

note: I list the Zotero fields here, not the bibtex fields. The Zotero fields are translated to bibtex fields but that translation is pretty complicated and I don’t have a simple description of it at this time.

¹ only supported in Juris-M