Defeating AIs with a screwdriver

A new BibLaTeX WordPress block

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I found that BibLaTeX nowadays supports URLs, Unicode characters, and all the modern stuff. I’ve always been a great LaTeX fan, since my university days. My book had a very complex millimeter-precise pagination such as:

\setlength\stockheight{210mm}
\setlength\stockwidth{148mm}
\setlength\paperheight{\stockheight}
\setlength\paperwidth{\stockwidth}

\setlength\textwidth{\lxvchars}
\setlength\textheight{1.61803398875\lxvchars}
\setlrmargins{*}{*}{1.61803398875}
\setulmargins{\spinemargin}{*}{*}

So, why not create a WordPress plugin that generates a BibLaTeX entry of the current post? But, even more funny, why not have something do it for me?

Introducing Telex

I work for Automattic, but it doesn’t take away the fact that I can be happy to use one of our products.

Telex is a “AI-Assisted Authoring Environment for WordPress Blocks”. Today it will help me as a not so popular request.

The prompt:

I want a block that output a biblatex entry of the current page. It should have this identifier "zaerl{YEAR}-{POST SLUG WITHOUT YEAR, MONTH, DAY}.
As author "Francesco Bigiarini"
As title "The title of the post"
As date "The date of the post"
As url "The url of the post"
as urldate "The date of the post"

For example, for this post: https://zaerl.com/2025/08/23/unicode-buffering-and-printf/
The output should be:
@article{zaerl2025-unicode-buffering-and-printf,
  author = {Francesco Bigiarini},
  title = {Unicode Buffering and printf},
  date = {2025-08-23},
  url = {https://zaerl.com/2025/08/23/unicode-buffering-and-printf/},
  urldate = {2025-08-23}
}
The block should be output in fixed width font.

And it generated:

@online{zaerl2025-biblatex-citation-demo-page,
  author = {Francesco Bigiarini},
  title = {BibLaTeX Citation demo page},
  date = {2025-11-17},
  url = {https://playground.automattic.ai/scope:biblatex-citation/biblatex-citation-demo-page/},
  urldate = {2025-11-17}
}

Isn’t this cool? I downloaded the .zip and tried it on a blank Playground site and it was working. Just needed a second little request. To be sure the style will blend well with the site.

Use the "code" block as the base of the block and not custom CSS or HTML

Plugin installation

  1. Downloaded the .zip
  2. Uploaded the plugin and activated
  3. Added the block to the single post template

And it was done. You can find the Telex project here. And the result after this paragraph. It took more time to write this post than to have this new plugin.

@online{zaerl2025-a-new-biblatex-wordpress-block,
  author = {Francesco Bigiarini},
  title = {A new BibLaTeX WordPress block},
  date = {2025-11-17},
  url = {https://zaerl.com/2025/11/17/a-new-biblatex-wordpress-block/},
  urldate = {2025-11-17}
}

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