Sync BibLaTeX bibliography metadata into Obsidian Markdown note frontmatter.

Given a .bib file and a directory of Markdown notes, bib2md converts each bibliography entry into structured YAML and merges it into the frontmatter of the matching note. Authors are formatted as Obsidian wiki-links ([[First Last]]), groups become tags, and keywords become a list.

• Python 3.10+
• pybtex (provides the pybtex-convert CLI)
• PyYAML
• python-frontmatter

pip install -r requirements.txt

python bib2md.py <bib_file> <yaml_file> <md_directory>

python bib2md.py library.bib /tmp/library.yaml ~/obsidian/vault/papers/

Each Markdown file is matched to a bibliography entry by filename. The leading @ and file extension are stripped, and the name is lowercased before lookup.

Files with no matching entry are skipped with a warning.

• Scalar fields (title, year, journal, …) are created or overwritten.
• List fields (authors, tags, keywords) are merged — existing entries are kept and only new unique values are appended.

Example output frontmatter:

title: On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies
authors:
  - "[[Albert Einstein]]"
year: 1905
tags:
  - physics
  - relativity
keywords:
  - special relativity
  - electrodynamics

pytest