Format macros

These macros control control the appearance of references and citations.

Fr

Defines the format for references in the bibliography.

Default: %a {(%y)}. {\fI%t\fR}. {\*Q%q\*U}. %n, %d. %c: %p. {Available: %w}

Ff

Defines the format for “full” citations, which by default contain both author and year.

Default: (%A %y)

Fx

Defines the format for “alternate” citations, which by default contain only the year.

Default: (%y)

For a description of the format syntax, see FORMAT SYNTAX.

Reference definition macros

In the reference list or bibliography, a single reference is defined by a contiguous block of lines containing any of the macros described below. The definition of one reference is separated from that of another by any other lines, including text lines, empty lines and lines containing other macros than the ones listed below.

Ra

Defines the author of the publication. You can use Ra more than once in order to define multiple authors.

Format: Surname, Forename/Initial

Rc

Defines the city of publication.

Rd

Defines the (detailed) date of publication, not as a substitute for Ry, but as a further specification. For example, the day and month a newspaper article was published.

Rn

Defines the newspaper in which an article was published.

Rp

Defines the publisher of a book.

Rq

Defines the (quoted) title of an article.

Rt

Defines the title of a book.

Rw

Defines the (web) address of an online resource.

Ry

Defines the year of publication.

In the final output, rf prints a formatted version of each reference in place of its definition. rf does not change the order of reference. This means that you can arrange your references freely.

Citation macros

To insert a citation, you can use one of two macros:

Rf

Inserts a “full” citation, which usually contains both author and year.

Rx

Inserts an “alternate” citation, which usually contains only the year.

Reference identification.  After the macro name, you should provide one or more keywords to identify the reference to which the citation is to refer. Each word is matched case-insensitively against the author, year and title of all references. For example:

.Rf Trubetzkoy 1969

If only a weak match is found, a helpful warning is printed on standard error.

Adjacent punctuation.  To include some punctuation character immediately after the inline reference, use the following syntax:

.Rf Grot 1873 .

To wrap the inline reference in parentheses, use the following syntax:

.Rf Courtenay 1972 ) (

Shortcuts.  Any instance of '' is replaced with the last word on the preceding line. This allows the following shortcut:

According to Brandt
.Rx '' 1892 ,
Russian differs from other European languages in its [...]

Interpolation

In a format specification, use a percent (%) sigil followed by a single letter to interpolate any given field of the reference. The letter following the percent sign corresponds to the second letter of the reference list macros described above. For example:

.Ff (%A, %y)      \" (Author, Year)

By wrapping an interpolation in braces, you can specify a prefix and/or suffix that should be included only if the interpolation is successful. For example:

.Ff (%A{, %y}).   \" Here, ', ' is removed if there is no year.

To interpolate only the surnames of the authors, you can use the special %A syntax, with an uppercase instead of lowercase ‘a’.

Multiple lines

If no argument is given to a format macro, then rf will read the format specification from the following lines until a line containing ‘..’ is encountered, signifying the end of the multi-line format specification.

Within a multi-line format spefication, use the escapes \$2 and \$3 to interpolate (respectively) any suffix and prefix given to the citation macro.

For example, the following multi-line format specification implements footnote references:

.Fx
\$3\**\$2
.FS
%a, {\fI%t\fR}, {\*Q%q\*U}, %y.
.FE
..

Automatic cleanup

You usually don't need to worry about excessive spaces and stray punctuation marks. rf removes common punctuation immediately preceding and following an unsuccessful interpolation. Excessive spaces are also removed, unless they follow a period, marking the end of a sentence.