PreTeXt supports three styles of markup for the <biblio> entries of a <references> division. To compare them, the same twelve references appear three times in the divisions that follow, once in each style. The references are deliberately varied: books and journal articles, a chapter and a conference paper, a thesis, a report, a software system, and a web page; with one, two, and three authors, as well as organizational authors.
A raw entry (type="raw") is free-form mixed content: the author supplies the order, the punctuation, and almost all of the formatting, while PreTeXt styles only a few recognized elements, such as an italicized <title>, a bold <volume>, a parenthesized <year>, and a <number> prefixed by βno.β
A BibTeX-style entry (type="bibtex") uses structured fields, rendered in the order written, with punctuation supplied automatically. The result is more uniform than raw markup, but the field set is small, so details with no dedicated fieldβan edition, a URL, a thesis designation, a report numberβare tucked into a free-form <pubnote>.
A CSL-style entry records structured data onlyβnames, dates, titles, and the likeβusing markup modeled on the CSL-JSON data format, in a fixed canonical order. The order of presentation and the punctuation are then supplied by PreTeXt, or, when a CSL style is configured in the publication file, by the citeproc processor. This is the recommended style as of 2025-08-13.
Jane Q. Author, βFinite Fields and Their Applicationsβ, in Topics in Modern Algebra, edited by John Smith, Academic Press, San Diego, CA, 2010, 45β98.
A. Lovelace, C. Babbage, and G. Boole, βA Fast Algorithm for Matrix Factorizationβ, in Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians, 2018, 1123β1140.
A. Lovelace, C. Babbage, and G. Boole, A Fast Algorithm for Matrix Factorization, Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians, (2018) pp.β1123-1140.
Lovelace, A.; C. Babbage and G. Boole, A Fast Algorithm for Matrix Factorization, Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians (2018) 1123-1140.