Mac-Safe Citation Filename

If you’ve ever tried to save a paper using the full citation as a filename, you know the pain: slashes, colons, DOIs, or URLs that macOS rejects — plus filenames that get cut off at 255 characters. Mac-Safe Citation Filename is a tiny offline-first tool that cleans citations into safe, shareable filenames instantly.

How it works

• Paste citation: Drop any academic citation into the textarea
• Instant sanitization: The tool strips out unsafe characters, URLs/DOIs, and trailing punctuation
• Mac-safe output: Get a clean filename with live length count, respecting macOS limits
• Copy: Copy the filename to your clipboard

All transformations happen in your browser — nothing is uploaded.

Key features

• Smart sanitization rules
  Automatically handles Unicode normalization, removes risky characters, collapses repeated separators, and trims edges.

• Customizable options
  Choose replacement characters (-, _, or space), decide how to treat spaces, enforce title/lower/sentence case, and append extensions like .pdf.

• Length safety
  Respects the macOS filename limit (255 chars). Long filenames are truncated cleanly, with ellipsis before any extension.

• Accessibility & polish

  • Keyboard-friendly controls with clear focus states
  • Real-time filename length counter with red highlight when exceeding the limit
  • Offline support, responsive design, and localStorage persistence for your settings

Why you’ll love it

Instead of wrestling with “invalid filename” errors, Mac-Safe Citation Filename gives you predictable, neat filenames every time. It’s especially handy for grad students, researchers, and anyone organizing large libraries of PDFs.

Just a tiny, polished, client-side utility.

👉 Try it now at https://citation-filename-generator.vercel.app and take control of your research library.