Biber is a
bibliography
Bibliography (from and ), as a discipline, is traditionally the academic study of books as physical, cultural objects; in this sense, it is also known as bibliology (from ). English author and bibliographer John Carter describes ''bibliograph ...
information processing program that works in conjunction with the
LaTeX
Latex is an emulsion (stable dispersion) of polymer microparticles in water. Latices are found in nature, but synthetic latices are common as well.
In nature, latex is found as a wikt:milky, milky fluid, which is present in 10% of all floweri ...
package BibLaTeX and offers full
Unicode
Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...
support.
Biber is a widely used replacement for the
BibTeX
BibTeX is both a bibliographic flat-file database file format and a software program for processing these files to produce lists of references (citations). The BibTeX file format is a widely used standard with broad support by reference manage ...
software. Both generate a
bibliography
Bibliography (from and ), as a discipline, is traditionally the academic study of books as physical, cultural objects; in this sense, it is also known as bibliology (from ). English author and bibliographer John Carter describes ''bibliograph ...
in
LaTeX
Latex is an emulsion (stable dispersion) of polymer microparticles in water. Latices are found in nature, but synthetic latices are common as well.
In nature, latex is found as a wikt:milky, milky fluid, which is present in 10% of all floweri ...
, but Biber offers a large superset of BibTeX functionality. It also offers full
Unicode
Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...
support, which is hard to achieve with BibTeX. Given the same data file as input, biber should output a functionally identical .bbl file as BibTeX.
Biber is written in
Perl
Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language".
Perl was developed ...
and includes the following features:
* full
Unicode
Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...
support
* user-definable mapping and suppression of fields
* multiple bibliography lists
* no memory limitations, and extensibility.
Some LaTeX packages have an explicit dependence on BibTeX itself and will not work with biber. The most important example is natbib, which provides style options for citation references.
However, natbib functionality can largely be recovered by using the natbib option to BibLaTeX, which is the
LaTeX
Latex is an emulsion (stable dispersion) of polymer microparticles in water. Latices are found in nature, but synthetic latices are common as well.
In nature, latex is found as a wikt:milky, milky fluid, which is present in 10% of all floweri ...
package for processing citation references that is commonly used in conjunction with biber.
References
External links
*
Explanation of biber vs BibTeX, biblatex vs natbibHow to transition from natbib/bibtex to biber
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BibTeX