Automated bibtex entry tweeting

Thu, 25 Aug 2016 12:14:31 EDT

The goal in this post is to develop an elisp function that will tweet a bibtex entry. What I want is to be on a bibtex entry, and run a command that will generate a tweet and tweet it. Here is an example bibtex entry I will use in this post. Clearly, I couldn't simply tweet the entry, it is too long. What I want instead is to generate a picture of a formatted citation, to make a gist out of the bibtex entry so we can link to it, and then to provide links in the tweet to the doi, and the bibtex entry gist.

(with-current-buffer (find-file-noselect "~/Dropbox/bibliography/references.bib")
  (goto-char (point-min))
  (re-search-forward "kitchin-2016-autom-data,")
  (bibtex-copy-entry-as-kill)
  (with-temp-buffer
    (bibtex-yank 1)
    (buffer-string)))

First, we tackle making an image. Emacs has some capability to generate svg, and we can readily convert that to png for the tweet. Here we just go to the entry, and then generate a png. I build off the citation capability of org-ref to generate a pretty reasonably formatted entry. It isn't perfect; the volume is missing in the entry, so there is a blank space between two commas, but this is good enough for me. Note we need a png for twitter. It appears you cannot upload svg yet.

(let* ((entry (with-current-buffer (find-file-noselect "~/Dropbox/bibliography/references.bib")
                (goto-char (point-min))
                (re-search-forward "kitchin-2016-autom-data,")
                (bibtex-beginning-of-entry)
                (bibtex-parse-entry t)))
       (formatted-entry (orhc-formatted-citation entry))
       (lines (with-temp-buffer
                (insert formatted-entry)
                (fill-paragraph)
                (split-string  (buffer-string) "\n")))
       (svg (svg-create 500 (* 20 (length lines)))))

  (loop for i from 0
        for line in lines
        do
        (svg-text svg line
                  :font-size "12"
                  :stroke "black"
                  :x 0
                  :y (+ 15 (* i 15))
                  :stroke-width 0.3))

  (with-temp-file "authoring.svg"
    (svg-print svg)))

(shell-command "convert authoring.svg authoring.png")

It is easy enough to get the doi, and generate the url to it.

(let* ((entry (with-current-buffer (find-file-noselect "~/Dropbox/bibliography/references.bib")
                (goto-char (point-min))
                (re-search-forward "kitchin-2016-autom-data,")
                (bibtex-beginning-of-entry)
                (bibtex-parse-entry t))))
  (format "https://doi.org/%s" (cdr (assoc "doi" entry ))))

Next, we will put the entry as a gist on Github, so we can provide a link to it. I use the gist.el package, and here just do some trickery to put the entry in a temp-file named by the key so that the gist has a nice name. This returns the url to the gist, which we would want to incorporate into a tweet.

(with-current-buffer (find-file-noselect "~/Dropbox/bibliography/references.bib")
  (goto-char (point-min))
  (re-search-forward "kitchin-2016-autom-data,")
  (save-restriction
    (bibtex-narrow-to-entry)
    (bibtex-beginning-of-entry)
    (let* ((entry-string (buffer-string))
           (entry (bibtex-parse-entry))
           (key (cdr (assoc "=key=" entry)))
           (tfile (expand-file-name (format "%s.bib" key) temporary-file-directory)))
      (with-temp-file tfile
        (insert entry-string))
      (with-current-buffer (find-file-noselect tfile)
        (gist-buffer)))
    (with-temp-buffer
      (yank)
      (buffer-string))))

Ok, All the pieces are in place. The only piece left is creating the tweet, and tweeting it. I couldn't see an obvious way to do this with twittering mode, since I didn't see where to add an image. There is a Python library for this though, and it looks pretty easy to use. Here is an example usage.

from TwitterAPI import TwitterAPI
from twitter_secrets import CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET, ACCESS_TOKEN_KEY, ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET

api = TwitterAPI(CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET, ACCESS_TOKEN_KEY, ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET)
file = open('authoring.png', 'rb')
data = file.read()
r = api.request('statuses/update_with_media', {'status':'A test tweet using the TwitterAPI with an image.'}, {'media[]':data})
print(r.status_code)

200

It will be a tad hacky, but the script is so simple we can just make a template, and run it. We need to do these things: 1) make the image, 2) make the gist 3) format and send the tweet. Here is the elisp function to do that.

(defun tweet-bibtex ()
  "Tweet the bibtex entry at point."
  (interactive)
  (bibtex-beginning-of-entry)
  (bibtex-set-field "tweeted" (current-time-string))

  (let* ((entry-string (save-restriction
                         (bibtex-beginning-of-entry)
                         (bibtex-narrow-to-entry)
                         (buffer-substring-no-properties (point-min) (point-max))))
         (entry (bibtex-parse-entry t))
         (key (cdr (assoc "=key=" entry)))
         (doi (cdr (assoc "doi" entry)))
         (svg-file (expand-file-name (format "%s.svg" key) temporary-file-directory))
         (png-file (expand-file-name (format "%s.png" key) temporary-file-directory))
         (bib-file (expand-file-name (format "%s.bib" key) temporary-file-directory))
         (py-file (expand-file-name (format "%s.py" key) temporary-file-directory))
         (formatted-entry (orhc-formatted-citation entry))
         (lines (with-temp-buffer
                  (insert formatted-entry)
                  (fill-paragraph)
                  (split-string  (buffer-string) "\n")))
         (svg (svg-create 500 (* 20 (length lines))))
         (tweet (read-string "Tweet: "))
         gist-url
         full-tweet)

    ;; delete buffers and files
    (loop for buf in (list (concat key ".bib")
                           (concat key ".png")
                           (concat key ".svg")
                           (concat key ".py"))
          do
          (when (get-buffer buf)
            (kill-buffer (get-buffer buf))))

    ;; Step 1 make the image
    (loop for i from 0
          for line in lines
          do
          (svg-text svg line
                    :font-size "12"
                    :stroke "black"
                    :x 0
                    :y (+ 15 (* i 15))
                    :stroke-width 0.3))

    (with-temp-file svg-file
      (svg-print svg))

    (shell-command (format "convert %s %s" svg-file png-file))

    ;; Step 2, make the gist. Make a temp-file so the gist has a reasonable name
    (with-temp-file bib-file
      (insert entry-string))

    (let ((bib-buffer (find-file-noselect bib-file)))
      (with-current-buffer bib-buffer
        (gist-buffer))
      (kill-buffer bib-buffer))

    ;; get url off clipboard
    (setq gist-url (with-temp-buffer
                     (yank)
                     (buffer-string)))

    ;; Format and send the tweet:
    (setq full-tweet (format "#publication %s\nhttps://doi.org/%s\nbibtex: %s" tweet doi gist-url))

    (with-temp-file py-file
      (insert (format "from TwitterAPI import TwitterAPI
from twitter_secrets import CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET, ACCESS_TOKEN_KEY, ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET

api = TwitterAPI(CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET, ACCESS_TOKEN_KEY, ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET)
file = open('%s', 'rb')
data = file.read()
r = api.request('statuses/update_with_media', {'status':'''%s'''}, {'media[]':data})"
                      png-file
                      full-tweet)))

    (if (= 0 (shell-command (format "python %s" py-file)))
        (message "%s" full-tweet)
      (message "tweet failed ;("))))

;; Now, try it out.
(with-current-buffer (find-file-noselect "~/Dropbox/bibliography/references.bib")
  (goto-char (point-min))
  (re-search-forward "kitchin-2016-autom-data,")
  (tweet-bibtex))

You can see what this tweet looks like here:

#publication I tweeted this from a bibtex file.https://t.co/NGVlRGqKSJ
bibtex: https://t.co/0UEkvyBKAM pic.twitter.com/OpbAt1h3OP
— John Kitchin (@johnkitchin) August 25, 2016

That seems pretty reasonable. Now I only need to use it about 48,000 times to benefit from the time-savings M-x tweet-bibtex offers compared to manually making all those tweets ;)

org-mode source

Org-mode version = 8.3.4

The Kitchin Research Group

Automated bibtex entry tweeting