@bepolymathe, not really, sorry.
First of all let’s fix up the terminology, this is often the reason why people misunderstand each other. So, BibTeX files do not contain references, they instead contain entries in the form of bibliographic records that follow a special BibTeX syntax. BibTeX records contain fields in the form of key = value pairs. A typical BibTeX record looks like this (examples are taken from here):
N.B. A BibTeX record starts with the "at" symbol and runs until the outermost
balanced "}" symbol, everything else are comments
A BibTeX record
entry type: "article"
BibTeX key: "einstein1905"
"author" is the name of a field (its key)
"Albert Einstein" is the the value of the filed "author"
------------------------------------
@article{einstein1905,
author = "Albert Einstein",
title = "{Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter K{\"o}rper}. ({German})
[{On} the electrodynamics of moving bodies]",
journal = "Annalen der Physik",
volume = "322",
number = "10",
pages = "891--921",
year = "1905",
DOI = "http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/andp.19053221004"
}
another BibTeX record
entry type: "book"
BibTeX key: "latexcompanion1993"
------------------------------------
@book{latexcompanion1993,
author = "Michel Goossens and Frank Mittelbach and Alexander Samarin",
title = "The \LaTeX\ Companion",
year = "1993",
publisher = "Addison-Wesley",
address = "Reading, Massachusetts"
}
yet another BibTeX record
entry type: "misc"
BibTeX key: "knuthwebsite"
------------------------------------
@misc{knuthwebsite,
author = "Donald Knuth",
title = "Knuth: Computers and Typesetting",
url = "http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/\~{}uno/abcde.html"
}
Now, Org Roam package doesn’t care about BibTeX at all, it even doesn’t know BibTeX exists. With Org Roam you can take notes about anything you like.
Org Roam BibTeX package, however, offers some integration of BibTeX into Org Roam. It is able to read your bibliography .bib file or files and put the retrieved information into an Org Roam template when a note is created. This can be achieved if you have placed special placeholders into your org-roam-capture-templates or orb-templates. When you create a note from helm-bibtex or org-ref, before the note’s template is expanded by org-roam, org-roam-bibtex reads the corresponding BibTeX record (helm-bibtex or org-ref have told it which exactly record to read) and “preformats” the placeholders with the values of the corresponding fields. Typically, a placeholder contains the field name, e.g. ${author} will be replaced with “Albert Einstein”, ${journal} will be replaced with “Annalen der Physik” and so on. This is how you get #+ROAM_KEY: einstein1905 from #+ROAM_KEY: ${citekey}.
But Org Roam BibTeX is completely agnostic with regard to what entry types you have, e.g @article, @book or @misc. It also doesn’t care about field keys and values. It works equally well for all of them. It also doesn’t know and doesn’t care about PDFs or HTML when creating a note.
After you’ve created a note, it is possible to run orb-note-actions to access such commands as “open PDF file” or “open URL link”. When you call such an action, Org Roam BibTeX looks for the entry key stored in #+ROAM_KEY: property, looks for the BibTeX record with this key and retrieves the values from file or url fields. If these values are retrievable, i.e. present in the particular record, Org Roam BibTeX will run the commands to open the PDF or URL.
There theoretically can be bugs in Org Roam BibTeX or the packages it depends on that will cause it to fail or produce some errors if you have non-conventional BibTeX entry types, but none that I’m aware of.
If you happen to explain your workflow in more detail, like “first I run this command, then I run this command and finally I run this command and this is my configuration file together with the relevant BibTeX record”, and also explain what prevents you from creating notes from your "html documents ", I’ll be happy to help you.
