antilibrary

About

Save any page to your antilibrary BibTeX library — auto-extract metadata, add tags, and optionally download the PDF/EPUB.

  Detailed description

  antilibrary turns your browser into the front door of your reference library.
  One click on the toolbar saves the current page as a clean BibTeX entry in the
  library of your choice — no copy-pasting citations, no leaving the page.

  It reads your local antilibrary config, so the same libraries you use from the
  command line and Emacs show up right in the popup.

  What it does:

  • Pick a library — choose which of your BibTeX libraries to save into, or use
    the quick-save shortcut to drop straight into your default.

  • Smart metadata — scrapes the page's citation tags, Open Graph, JSON-LD and
    title into a proper BibTeX entry. Ordinary pages become tidy @online
    bookmarks with a unique cite key.

  • Authoritative entries for papers — if the page is a PDF/EPUB or carries a
    DOI, arXiv ID or ISBN, antilibrary resolves it for a precise, canonical entry.

  • Tag as you save — type comma-separated tags in the popup and they're written
    to the entry's keywords field.

  • Keep the file, not just the link — tick "Download file & copy into library"
    to grab the PDF and file it into your library's folder, named after the cite
    key. The path is stored on the entry.

  • Quick-save shortcut — press Alt+Shift+S to save the current page to your
    default library instantly, with a confirmation notification. Rebind it at
    chrome://extensions/shortcuts.

  • Edit before saving — optionally review and tweak the title, authors and year
    before the entry is committed.

  Requirements: antilibrary is a companion to the open-source antilibrary toolkit.
  It talks to a small native helper that you install once on your computer
  (pip install 'antilibrary[all]', then register the native messaging host). The
  extension does the page; the helper writes your .bib files locally. Setup
  instructions: https://github.com/vxvware/antilibrary.chrome

  Open source (MIT). Your data never leaves your machine — see below.

  Single purpose

  Save the web page the user is viewing as a BibTeX reference (with optional file
  download) into the user's local antilibrary bibliography, via a native helper
  the user installs.

  Permission justifications

  • activeTab — to read the title, URL and citation metadata of the page the user
    explicitly chooses to save when they click the toolbar button or press the
    shortcut.

  • scripting — to run a small content script on that page, on demand, that
    collects its citation/Open Graph/JSON-LD metadata for the BibTeX entry.

  • nativeMessaging — to hand the collected entry (and any downloaded file) to the
    locally installed antilibrary helper, which writes it into the user's .bib
    library on their own computer.

  • notifications — to confirm the result of a quick-save (Alt+Shift+S), since
    that flow has no popup window to show success or failure.

  • Host permissions are not requested broadly; the extension only accesses a page
    when the user invokes it (activeTab).

  Data usage disclosure

  This extension does not collect, transmit, or sell any user data. Page metadata
  and any downloaded file are sent only to a native helper running on the user's
  own machine to write local BibTeX files. Nothing is sent to the developer or any
  third-party server.