pkgsrc/print/tex-biblatex/DESCR

The biblatex package is a complete reimplementation of the bibliographic
facilities provided by LaTeX in conjunction with BibTeX. It redesigns the way in
which LaTeX interacts with BibTeX at a fairly fundamental level. With biblatex,
BibTeX is only used (if it is used at all) to sort the bibliography and to
generate labels. Instead of being implemented in BibTeX's style files, the
formatting of the bibliography is entirely controlled by TeX macros. Good
working knowledge in LaTeX should be sufficient to design new bibliography and
citation styles - there is no need to learn BibTeX's postfix stack language.
Just like the bibliography styles, all citation commands may be freely
(re)defined. In fact, users need not remain bound to BibTeX for use with
biblatex: an alternative bibliography processor biblatex-biber is available.
Development of biblatex and biblatex-biber is closely coupled; the present
release of biblatex is designed to work with biblatex-biber version 0.9.3. The
package needs e-TeX, and uses the author's etoolbox and logreq packages. For
users of biblatex-biber, version 0.9 is required (at least; refer to the notes
for the version of biblatex-biber that you are using). Apart from the features
unique to biblatex, the package also incorporates core features of the following
packages: babelbib, bibtopic, bibunits, chapterbib, cite, inlinebib, mcite and
mciteplus, mlbib, multibib, splitbib. There are also some conceptual parallels
to the natbib and amsrefs packages. The biblatex package supports split
bibliographies, multiple bibliographies within one document, and separate lists
of bibliographic shorthands. Bibliographies may be subdivided into parts (by
chapter, by section, etc.) and/or segmented by topics (by type, by keyword,
etc.). The package is fully localized and can interface with the babel package.