Biber: A BibTeX replacement for users of BibLaTeX
The biblatex
package is becoming the definitive citation management
tool for LaTeX users. Biblatex provides a powerful and flexible macro
interface for authors of citation styles.
Biblatex's own data backend processor, biber, allows biblatex to offer the
following features:
- Deals with the full range of UTF-8
- Sorts in a completely customisable manner using, when available,
CLDR collation tailoring
- Allows for per-entrytype options
- Automatically encodes the .bbl into any supported encoding
format ("Supported" here means encodings supported by the
Perl Encode module)
- Processes all bibliography sections in one pass of the tool
- Handles UTF-8 citekeys and filenames (given a suitable fully
UTF-8 compliant TeX engine)
- Creates entry sets dynamically and allows easily defined static entry sets,
all processed in one pass
- "Syntactic" inheritance via new XDATA entrytype and
field. This can be thought of as a field-based generalisation of the
BibTeX @STRING functionality (which is also supported).
- "Semantic" inheritance via a generalisation of the BibTeX
crossreference mechanism. This is highly customisable by the
user--it is possible to choose which fields to inherit for which
entrytypes and to inherit fields under different names etc. Nested
crossreferences are also supported.
- Handles complex auto-expansion and contraction of names and
namelists (See section 4.11.4 of the BibLaTeX manual for an excellent
explanation with examples, this is quite an impressive feature ...)
- Extensible modular data sources architecture for ease of adding
more data source types
- Support for remote data sources
- User-definable mapping and suppression of fields and entrytypes in
data sources. You can use this to, for example, ignore all
ABSTRACT fields completely.
- Support for related entries, to enable generic treatment of things
like "translated as", "reprinted as", "reprint of"
etc
- Customisable labels
- Multiple bibliography lists in the same section with different sorting and filtering
- No more restriction to a static data model of specific fields and entrytypes.
- Structural validation of the data against the data model with a customisable validation model.
Biber has a comprehensive PDF manual which you can find on SourceForge
in the documentation folder for the release. Much of the functionality
is exposed through BibLaTeX and the BibLaTeX PDF manual is the primary
source for much Biber+BibLaTeX information. Biber-only features are
marked prominently in the BibLaTeX manual with the marginal note "Biber
only"
Biber 2.20 is now released.
It should be used in conjunction with biblatex 3.20".
Source code repository and bug tracker on Github
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