Biber – bibliography processing backend

Biber is a sophisticated, open source, bibliography processing backend for the LaTeX biblatex package.

It supports a unsurpassed feature set for automated conformance to complex bibliography style requirements such as labelling, sorting and name handling.

It has comprehensive Unicode support.

Biber is written in Perl with the aim of providing a customised and sophisticated data preparation backend for biblatex.

Biber’s primary role is to support Biblatex by performing the following tasks:

• Parsing data from datasources.
• Processing cross-references, entry sets, related entries.
• Generating data for name, name list and name/year disambiguation.
• Structural validation according to Biblatex data model.
• Sorting reference lists.
• Outputting data to a .bbl for Biblatex to consume.

Features include:

• Polyglossia support.
• Unicode 10.0 support (including citekeys, filenames and sorting).
• Auto (re)encodes .bbl as necessary.
• One biber run for all bib sections and XREF/CROSSREF processing.
• Static and dynamic citation set support. Creates entry sets dynamically.
• Customisable sorting specifications using, when available, CLDR collation tailoring.
• Support for UTF-8 <-> TeX macro re-encoding to help PDFLaTeX+inputenc.
• Support for remote data sources.
• Highly configurable entry data inheritance model. “Semantic” inheritance via a generalisation of the BibTeX crossreference mechanism.
• Automatic name and name list disambiguation.
• Dynamic, comprehensive modification of incoming bibliography data.
• Generalised macro support with new @XDATA entrytyp.
• Customisable labels.
• Output different formats than .bbl and can, for example, output a new BibTeX file which contains only cited entries from the data-sources (using the –output-format=bibtex option).
• Output to GraphViz instead of .bbl in order to help visualise complex bibliographies with many crossrefs etc.

Website: biblatex-biber.sourceforge.net
Support: Manual, SourceForge Project Page, GitHub code repository
Developer: François Charette and Philip Kime
License: Artistic License 2.0

Biber is written in Perl. Learn Perl with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

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