Skip to content

CiteURL Frontends

CiteURL can be used in a few forms besides the command-line tool and the Python library. Here's what they are:

CiteURL Server

If you just want to use CiteURL from your web browser, it's hosted as a web app at citation.link.

You can also host your own instance of it on your local network or beyond. This is useful if you want to add support for your own custom citation templates. The simplest way is to run this command:

citeurl host -st PATH_TO_YOUR_TEMPLATES.YAML

Or, if you're using a hosting provider like pythonanywhere.com, you can give it direct access to CiteURL as a Flask application:

from citeurl.web.server import App
from citeurl import Citator

APP = App(Citator(yaml_paths=['PATH_TO_YOUR_TEMPLATES.YAML']))

JavaScript

Although CiteURL is primarily a Python program, you can also use it to generate a JavaScript implementation of its citation lookup functionality, including any extra citation templates you've written. This allows it to be hosted on a static website (like mine, for example), or distributed as an HTML file that people can save to their own computers and bookmark as a custom search engine.

To make a JavaScript implementation, first make a YAML file with any custom citation templates you'd like to support. Next, open a command line and run the following command:

citeurl makejs -e -o output.html -t PATH_TO_YOUR_TEMPLATES.YAML

Alternatively, to omit CiteURL's default templates, include the -n option in that command. For more info, run citeurl makejs -h.

Markdown Extension

CiteURL can also be used as an extension to Python-Markdown. You can load the extension as citeurl, and it supports the following options:

  • custom_templates: A list of paths to YAML files containing custom citation templates. Defaults to none.
  • use_defaults: Whether CiteURL should load the default citation templates. Defaults to True.
  • attributes: A dictionary of HTML attributes to give each hyperlink that CiteURL inserts into the text. Defaults to {'class': 'citation'}.
  • redundant_links: Whether to insert a link even when its URL would be the same as the last one.
  • URL_optional: Whether to insert a link even when it doesn't have a URL.
  • break_id_on_regex: Anywhere this string (parsed as regex) appears in the text, chains of citations like id. will be interrupted. Note that this is based on the output HTML, not the original Markdown text. Defaults to L\. ?Rev\.|J\. ?Law|\. ?([Cc]ode|[Cc]onst)
  • ignore_markup: Whether CiteURL should detect citations even when they are interrupted by markup, like "\Id.\ at 37." Defaults to True.

GNOME Shell Search Provider

If you use the GNOME desktop environment, you can install my other project to look up citations directly from your desktop!