#Overview

This package provides advanced bibliographic facilities for use with LaTeX.

The package is a complete reimplementation of the bibliographic facilities provided by LaTeX. A custom backend Biber is used by default which processes BibTeX format data files and them performs all sorting, label generation (and a great deal more).

Biblatex does not use the backend to format the bibliography information as with traditional BibTeX: instead of being implemented in BibTeX style files, the formatting of the bibliography is entirely controlled by TeX macros.

This package supports subdivided bibliographies, multiple bibliographies within one document with different sorting, separate lists of bibliographic information such as abbreviations of various fields. Bibliographies may be subdivided into parts and / or segmented by topics.

Just like the bibliography styles, all citation commands may be freely defined.

With Biber as the backend, features such as customisable sorting, multiple bibliographies with different sorting, customisable labels, dynamic data modification and custom data models are available.

The package is completely localised and can interface with the Babel and Polyglossia packages.

#Copyright and Licence

##Authors

• Philipp Lehman
• Philip Kime, Joseph Wright, Audrey Boruvka (since 2011)

##Copyright

• Copyright 2006 --- 2011 Philipp Lehman
• Copyright 2011 --- ... Philip Kime

##Licence This work may be distributed and/or modified under the conditions of the LaTeX Project Public License, either version 1.3 of this license or (at your option) any later version.

The latest version of the license is in http://www.latex-project.org/lppl.txt and version 1.3 or later is part of all distributions of LaTeX version 2003/06/01 or later.

This work has the LPPL maintenance status "maintained".

#Installation

biblatex is bundled with TeXLive and its variants.

biblatex starts life on Github where you can always find development releases:

https://github.com/plk/biblatex

From here, it is packaged for general consumption to SourceForge:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/biblatex

this is where users can download the current development version.

The latest official release is then put onto CTAN, which is where users can get the latest stable version:

http://ctan.org/pkg/biblatex

Installation from github

For this you'll need to be on a UNIX-like system (use http://www.cygwin.com on Windows) that has bash and perl.

First clone the repo:

git clone https://github.com/plk/biblatex.git

Then from the clone root:

obuild/build.sh install <version> <texmf root>

for example, say the currently released version is 3.3 and you want to try the 3.4 development version. Suppose your personal texmf root is at ~/texmf:

obuild/build.sh install 3.4 ~/texmf

If this is the first time you are installing biblatex into ~/texmf, you will have to tell TeX that it can find the files in this new location with texhash or the equivalent command from your TeX distribution.

Obviously, its is easier to get the TDS format package from the Sourceforge development folder and just unpack it into your ~/texmf but this might not be quite as recent as the git development branch (but is usually very close).

#Help

• biblatex comes with example files in the doc/latex/biblatex/examples directory in the distribution. There are a lot of practical examples here along with comments in the source .tex files which help to explain details not dwelt on in the PDF manual.
• StackExchange

#Debug and feature requests

Suggestions and bug reports are welcome.

• Go to the Github issues page.
• Open an issue.
• Add a minimal working example if possible. This helps a great deal facilitate a swift response.