BibTool Manual Reference Manual Field Manipulation Field Ordering

Field Ordering

Fields can be reordered within an entry. This feature is controlled by the presence of a specification for the order to use. The order is specified with the resource sort.order. The general form is as follows:

sort.order { entry = field₁ # field₂ # ... }

entry is the name of an entry like book. The fields are an arbitrary number of field names like author. This specification says that field1 should precede field2 etc. Fields which are not in this list are arranged after the specified ones. The are left in the same order as they appear in the entry.

Another possibility is to specify the entry *. Such a sorting order is applicable to any kind of entry. If no specific sort order is found then this general order is used if one has been specified.

Any sorting order is added to a list of sorting orders if it has not been defined before. If a sorting order is specified again, the old one is simply overwritten.

Consider the following part of a resource file:

sort.order = {* = author # title}

This means that the author field goes before the title field in any entry type. For the misc entries additional specifications are made.

The library sort_fld.rsc contains a sample sorting order for the standard entry types.

BibTool Manual Reference Manual Field Manipulation Field Ordering