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 ''bibliography ...
information processing program that works in conjunction with the
LaTeX
Latex is an emulsion (stable dispersion) of polymer microparticles in water. Latexes are found in nature, but synthetic latexes are common as well.
In nature, latex is found as a milky fluid found in 10% of all flowering plants (angiosperms ...
package BibLaTeX and offers full
Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...
support.
Biber is a widely used replacement for the
BibTeX
BibTeX is reference management software for formatting lists of references. The BibTeX tool is typically used together with the LaTeX document preparation system. Within the typesetting system, its name is styled as . The name is a portmanteau ...
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 ''bibliography ...
in
LaTeX
Latex is an emulsion (stable dispersion) of polymer microparticles in water. Latexes are found in nature, but synthetic latexes are common as well.
In nature, latex is found as a milky fluid found in 10% of all flowering plants (angiosperms ...
, but Biber offers a large superset of BibTeX functionality. It also offers full
Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...
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 family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offici ...
and includes the following features:
* full
Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...
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.
[http://texdoc.net/texmf-dist/doc/latex/natbib/natbib.pdf ]
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. Latexes are found in nature, but synthetic latexes are common as well.
In nature, latex is found as a milky fluid found in 10% of all flowering plants (angiosperms ...
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