[Tex/LaTex] biblatex in a nutshell (for beginners)

biblatex

Is there a 'biblatex in a nutshell' guide out there?
I'd like if someone explained to me the essentials on how to use biblatex (what lines I have to write in my document, which files I have to have, how many times and what I have to compile), so then I can go to http://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/biblatex/doc/biblatex.pdf to customise it further.

Best Answer

A minimal document for biblatex would be

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{biblatex}
% \bibliography{<database>} % deprecated
\addbibresource{<database>.<extension>}
\begin{document}
\cite{<some-ref>}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

which requires a <database> file in .bib format. You then run:

  1. LaTeX
  2. Biber
  3. LaTeX

Normally, you'd also select a bibliography style by loading this an an optional argument to the biblatex line

\usepackage[style=numeric-comp]{biblatex}

See How to use biber and Biblatex with Biber: Configuring my editor to avoid undefined citations for more if your editor is not set up to offer Biber 'out of the box'.

For some time, biblatex has supported two 'backends' (the program that extracts references from the .bib file), BibTeX and Biber. As of version 2, Biber is the default backend, so I have used it above. Biber is more powerful and works natively with UTF-8 input, but where it is not available one can fall back on more limited support using BibTeX. The workflow is pretty similar:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[backend=bibtex8]{biblatex}
% \bibliography{<database>} % deprecated
\addbibresource{<database>.<extension>}
\begin{document}
\cite{<some-ref>}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

and you then need to run

  1. LaTeX
  2. BibTeX
  3. LaTeX

As you'll see, this is very little difference from using Biber: basically replace 'Biber' with 'BibTeX'.

You should use the '8-bit' version of BibTeX as a minimum, rather than the ancient 7-bit BibTeX. At the Command line, this is used by doing

bibtex8 --wolfgang <filename>

where <filename> is the name of your LaTeX file.

There is more you can do, but this should get you started.

Recent versions of biblatex have deprecated

\bibliography{<database>} % Must be .bib

in favour of the more general

 \addbibresource{<database>.<extension>}

The latter is more general, but you must include the file extension (usually .bib).

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