The ox-bibtex package from the org contrib packages provides a good alternative to org-ref for managing a a Bibtex bibliography.

During the last few months, I became a huge fan of editing plain text document using Org instead of Markdown. Since I recently switched to Doom Emacs, I had to refactor some of my configuration files, and I decided to go without org-ref as it adds an unnecessary package overload because of Helm. My default swiss army knife is now Ivy and Counsel. There are other options to manage Bibtex files in Emacs, including org-bibtex, but see this nice screencast by Eric Schulte. Of note, there is also an interesting thread on Reddit. The question is how to get the best of both worlds, namely HTML and PDF exports, with Org cite: only links.

TL;DR The key idea is to add these two lines anywhere in your configuration files (probably in an “after-load” statement):

(require 'ox-bibtex)
(setq org-latex-pdf-process '("latexmk -pdf -outdir=%o %f"))

The first instruction obviously makes “ox-bibtex” available for us. The second line is more interesting since it allows to update the way we generate the $\LaTeX$ output, since by default it is just a triple pass through pdflatex. If you want to generate the bibliography keys, you also need to add Bibtex to this toolchain, but a prettier solution is to rely on latexmk or “texi2pdf”. Both programs come with a default TeX distribution. Similar approaches were discussed elsewhere, in particular in one of Kieran Healy’s blog post. In my case, I just selected the “pdflatex” option (it is easy enough to update the variable afterwards) but I added an output directory like it was originally defined in the variable org-latex-pdf-process. If you prefer “texi2pdf”, you can just use (setq org-latex-pdf-process '("texi2dvi -p -b -V %f")). This is probably the best way to go if you want to export all output files in a separate directory (e.g., a build/ directory), and it works quite well with Doom Emacs which redirects exported files to a subfolder .export/ in the directory dedicated to Org. However, for whatever reasons it didn’t work with HTML output: bibtex2html has no way to use an output directory other than the current working directory and I don’t want to manage multiple Bibtex files (e.g., one file per project). Either way, this is probably the result of some combination of Doom Emacs default settings with a central repository for exported documents (as defined in /modules/lang/org/+export.el) and a lack of configuration option for “bibtex2html”. I decided to symlink my Bibtex file to the .export/ folder, and this now works. You will also have to add limit:t in your Bibtex headline, otherwise “bibtex2html” will include all your bibliography entries (“bibtex” does exactly the reverse in a $\LaTeX$ document)!

#+BIBLIOGRAPHY: references plain limit:t

A final note: If you want other than the default $\LaTeX$ export options, you likely want to add some custom $\LaTeX$ classes in your init.el (this is controlled by the variable org-latex-classes).

Compared to “org-ref”, this may appear as an edulcorated version as we don’t have the interaction between PDF files and Emacs buffers, Helm to lookup references in our Bibtex file or live cite: links. However, things are not so bad: (1) we can use org cite: instead of \cite{} command and this work for HTML and PDF output, and (2) it is easy to insert citation via “org-reftex” (C-c C-x [) or from Ivy-bibtex.