Biber: BibTeX replacement for biblatex
Description: Biber is a BibTeX replacement for users of biblatex, written in Perl
Keywords: biber bibtex biblatex bibliography processing unicode xml dbxml
Date: 2009-07-23T15:54:05+0200

# 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 2.16 is now released. It should be used in conjunction with biblatex 3.16".