RIS Citation & Bibliography Support
Clean, robust syntax highlighting and reference folding for RIS (.ris) bibliography files.
Overview
The RIS Citation & Bibliography Support extension adds first-class support for Research Information Systems (.ris) bibliographic citation files in VS Code, Antigravity IDE, and compatible editors.
RIS is a standardized tag format widely used by reference management tools such as Mendeley, Zotero, EndNote, RefWorks, and academic publishers (IEEE, ACM, Springer, Taylor & Francis, ScienceDirect). This extension makes large bibliographic exports readable, structured, and easy to navigate.
Features
🎯 Record Boundary Delimiters (TY / ER)
- Delimiters
TY (record start) and ER (record end) are prominently highlighted using control keyword scopes, clearly framing each citation.
- Publication type codes following
TY (e.g., JOUR, BOOK, CONF, THES) are styled distinctly to identify the reference type at a glance.
🏷️ Tag & Value Separation
- Metadata tags (
AU, TI, PY, JO, KW, SP, EP, etc.) stand out visually from their associated values.
- Separators (
-) use neutral punctuation styling to keep the layout clean and uncluttered.
🔗 Smart Link & DOI Detection
- Direct link fields (
UR, DO, LK, L1, L2, L4) are automatically recognized and styled with link underline formatting.
- Embedded URLs (
https://...) and DOIs (10.xxxx/...) appearing inside abstract paragraphs or notes are also detected and highlighted as links.
📝 Multiline Continuation Handling
- Fields such as abstracts (
AB) and notes (N1) frequently span multiple lines without repeating the tag prefix.
- Subsequent lines are treated seamlessly as continuations of the active field without syntax errors or token breaks.
🛡️ Graceful Fallback for Custom/Unknown Tags
- Any 2-character tag matching the standard format (
^[A-Z][A-Z0-9] - ) is cleanly parsed, preventing proprietary or vendor-specific tags from disrupting the rest of the document.
📂 Code Folding by Reference
- Easily fold (collapse) and expand each individual reference in the editor gutter, allowing you to quickly navigate files containing hundreds or thousands of citations.
🎨 Universal Theme Compatibility
- Built strictly with standard TextMate scopes (
keyword.control, entity.name.tag, entity.name.type, markup.underline.link, string.unquoted, punctuation.separator).
- Works out of the box with default Dark, Dark Modern, Light, Light Modern, Monokai, and Solarized themes without requiring customized color rules.
Example
TY - JOUR
AU - Silva, J.
AU - Santos, M. A.
TI - Machine Learning Architectures for Bibliographic Data
PY - 2023
JO - Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research
VL - 12
IS - 3
SP - 100
EP - 115
DO - 10.1000/xyz123
UR - https://doi.org/10.1000/xyz123
AB - This abstract spans across multiple lines in the export file
without repeating the tag prefix on subsequent lines.
Additional details are available at https://example.org/project-info.
KW - artificial intelligence
KW - citations
KW - machine learning
ER -
Installation
From Open VSX Registry / VS Code Marketplace
Search for RIS Citation & Bibliography Support (decobeto.ris-syntax-highlighting) in your editor's Extensions tab (Ctrl+Shift+X) and click Install.
Manual Installation via VSIX
Download the latest ris-syntax-highlighting-0.1.0.vsix from the Releases page and run:
code --install-extension ris-syntax-highlighting-0.1.0.vsix
Or in Antigravity IDE:
antigravity-ide --install-extension ris-syntax-highlighting-0.1.0.vsix
Contributing & Issues
Contributions, suggestions, and issue reports are welcome!
License
This project is licensed under the MIT License.
