It is possible to describe your own bibliography style, by writing a simple XML file. The XML file should have the following header: <?xml version="1.0"?> <!DOCTYPE bibstyle PUBLIC "-//Pybliographer//DTD Bibliographic Style Format//EN" ""> The whole description should fit in a <bibstyle> pair of tags, whose content is shortly described in this section. It is suggested that the interested users look at the corresponding DTD, which describes the allowed syntax in details. This DTD can be found in the same directory as the default style files. The XML style file describes how the different data fields are organized in order to create a bibliographic style. For example, it can specify that an article starts with the article title in bold, followed by the authors names, etc. In its current incarnation, the XML format can however not describe lower-level informations, like how an author's name should be output. This is done by pointing to a set of python functions, grouped in a module. Let's consider the following example: <module name="generic"> <define field="author">full_authors</define> <define field="editor">first_last_full_authors</define> <define field="date">european_date</define> <define method="keys">string_keys</define> </module> In this example, we require that the author fields should be formatted by the full_authors() function, located in the generic module. Such a module has to be declared in the pybrc.py file, by a line like: Autoload.preregister ('style','Generic','Pyblio.Style.Generic') The precise definition of the formatting functions is better explained by looking at the code of Generic.py for example. Once the basic formatting definitions have been specified, it is possible to describe the aspect of the actual bibliographies with following tags: <style name="stylename"> This tag specifies the current display style, among bold, italic, slanted, emph. <inentry name="entryname"> This tag encloses a block that is only to appear in entries of type entryname. <notinentry name="entryname"> This tag encloses a block that is only to appear in entries that are not of type entryname. <infield name="fieldname"> This tag encloses a block that only appears when the specified fieldname field exists in the current entry. <notinfield name="fieldname"> This tag encloses a block that only appears when the specified fieldname field does not exist in the current entry. <content name="fieldname"/> This empty tag is replaced by the content of the current field (when placed in a <infield> block) or the content of the field specified as attribute. <separator> This tag's content evaluates to nothing when no text has been issued so far. It is a convenient way to add a delimiter after a series of fields without being worried of the special case when the fields are not defined. The existing style files are a good source of examples. In the future, this rudimentary format will most likely be replaced with an XSL-based mechanism, which should encompass both the XML definition and the python modules, thus providing standalone style files, parsable by any XSL parser.