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<head>
<title>UK TeX FAQ -- question label biblatex</title>
</head><body>
<h3>Replacing the BibTeX&#8211;LaTeX mechanism</h3>
<p/>Producing a successor to BibTeX has long been a favoured activity
among a certain class of TeX-users; the author has seen reports of
progress (on several projects), over the years, but few that claim to
be ready for &#8220;real-world&#8221; use.
<p/>Few would deny that BibTeX is ripe for renewal: as originally
conceived, it was a program for creating bibliographies for technical
documents, in English.  People have contributed mechanisms for a
degree of multilingual use (whose techniques are arcane, and quite
likely inextensible); and specialist BibTeX style files are
available for use in non-technical papers.
<p/>BibTeX uses a style language whose mechanisms are unfamiliar to
most current programmers: it&#8217;s difficult to learn, but since there are
few opportunities to write the language, it&#8217;s also difficult to become
fluent (in the way that so many people fluently write the equally
arcane TeX macro language).
<p/>Oren Patashnik (the author of BibTeX) summarises the issues as he
sees them, in a 
<a href="http://tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb24-1/patashnik.pdf">TUG conference paper from 2003</a>
that seems to suggest that we might expect a
BibTeX 1.0&#8230;which hasn&#8217;t (yet) appeared.
<p/>In the absence of BibTeX 1.0, what do we need from the bibliography
system of the future? &#8212; simple: a superset of what BibTeX does
(or can be made to do), implemented in a simpler style language, with
coherent multilingual capabilities.
<p/>Of the direct BibTeX replacements, the only one whose authors have
sufficient confidence to submit to CTAN is CrossTeX.
CrossTeX&#8217;s language feels familiar to the existing user of
BibTeX, but it&#8217;s redesigned in an object-oriented style, and looks
(to a non-user) as if it may well be adequately flexible.
<p/>CrossTeX&#8217;s team respond to queries, and seem well aware of the
need for multilingual support.  CrossTeX is probably a development
to watch.
<p/>Two interesting alternative approaches, that the author has
investigated, are <i>amsrefs</i> and <i>biblatex</i>.
<i>Amsrefs</i> does away with BibTeX altogether, while
<i>biblatex</i> (at least for now) makes rather limited use of
BibTeX.  Both are heavily dependent on LaTeX&#8217;s support.
<p/><i>Amsrefs</i> uses a transformed <code>.bib</code> file, which is
expressed as LaTeX macros.  (The package provides a BibTeX style
that performs the transformation, so that a LaTeX source containing
a <code>\</code><code>nocite{*}</code> command enables BibTeX to produce a usable
<i>amsrefs</i> bibliography database.)
<p/><i>Amsrefs</i> is maintained by the AMS as part of its author
support programme,
<p/><i>Biblatex</i> uses BibTeX simply to sort the citations using
<i>biblatex</i>&#8217;s own style; the style of citations and of the
bibliography itself is determined by the way your <i>biblatex</i>
style has been set up.  This structure eliminates the collections of
BibTeX styles, at a stroke; the package comes with a basic set of
styles, and details are determined by options, set at package loading
time.  The author, Philipp Lehman, evaluated the whole field of
bibliography software before starting, and as a result the package
comes with answers to many of the questions asked in the bibliography
sections of these FAQs.
<p/><i>Biblatex</i> is released as experimental software, but it&#8217;s
clear that many users are already using it happily; Lehman is
responsive to problem reports, at the moment, but a set of expert
users is already establishing itself.  A set of contributed styles has
appeared, which cover some of the trickier bibliography styles.  The
road map of the project shows one more <em>beta</em> release before the
&#8220;stable&#8221; <i>biblatex</i> 1.0.
<p/>A related project is 
<a href="http://biblatex-biber.sourceforge.net/"><i>biber</a></i>
(it&#8217;s called <i>biblatex-biber</i> on SourceForge simply to
distinguish it from an older, defunct, BibTeX replacement
project).  <i>Biber</i> is a <i>Perl</i>-based system to
produce a BibTeX replacement that is specifically tuned to the
requirements of <i>biblatex</i>.  While it supports the
&#8216;traditional&#8217; BibTeX interface, <i>biber</i> provides an
interface language designed for <i>biblatex</i>, including use of
Unicode to ease the generation of multilingual citations.
<dl>
<dt><tt><i>amsrefs.sty</i></tt><dd><a href="http://mirror.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/amsrefs.zip">macros/latex/contrib/amsrefs</a> (or <a href="http://mirror.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/amsrefs/">browse the directory</a>); <a href="http://mirror.ctan.org/help/Catalogue/entries/amsrefs.html">catalogue entry</a>
<dt><tt><i>biber</i></tt><dd><a href="http://mirror.ctan.org/biblio/biber.zip">biblio/biber</a> (or <a href="http://mirror.ctan.org/biblio/biber/">browse the directory</a>); <a href="http://mirror.ctan.org/help/Catalogue/entries/biber.html">catalogue entry</a>
<dt><tt><i>biblatex.sty</i></tt><dd><a href="http://mirror.ctan.org/macros/latex/exptl/biblatex.zip">macros/latex/exptl/biblatex</a> (or <a href="http://mirror.ctan.org/macros/latex/exptl/biblatex/">browse the directory</a>); <a href="http://mirror.ctan.org/help/Catalogue/entries/biblatex.html">catalogue entry</a>
<dt><tt><i>biblatex contributions</i></tt><dd><a href="http://mirror.ctan.org/macros/latex/exptl/biblatex-contrib">macros/latex/exptl/biblatex-contrib</a>
<dt><tt><i>CrossTeX</i></tt><dd><a href="http://mirror.ctan.org/biblio/crosstex">biblio/crosstex</a>; <a href="http://mirror.ctan.org//help/Catalogue/entries/crosstex.html">catalogue entry</a>
</dl>
<p/><p/>


<p/><p/><p/><p>This question on the Web: <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=biblatex">http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=biblatex</a>
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