I've been nagged by a couple of people now to convert my faith to biblatexism. I tried it all in one go, and it screwed the pooch rather on my 250 page document. I'm trying it in parts with a trial document. At the moment I have two questions, the first is covered here.
There seems to be a rather odd convention within biblatex. It details how it expects the various fields of a bibliography to be output in the manual. The month field, which throws up lots of nasty warnings for me, requires either a numeric input or a three letter input of the form jan, feb…
This must not be in braces though. I get my citation references from the publisher's websites and putting fields in braces appears to be a very standard way of doing things. So it seems to me bizarre that a bibliography and reference package would be incompatible with the way publishers tend to provide data. one solution would be to go through and change all of my references in my reference file, but this doesn't settle well with me as a solution. Is there some other more sensible solution? Maybe there is an option. Maybe biblatex is one of those packages where the turn around for a mod. suggestion and a new version available on ctan is a few days.
Edit:
In response to Gonzalo Medina. I actually kind of had a solution in mind, leaving the question general so as not to limit the possible answers. I read somewhere that one can get biblatex to filter out certain fields some how. I don't actually need the month in my references (actually I've gone through them, making them compatible now), it just irritated be that it threw up warnings when I compiled.
I also thought that it might be possible to change some package option so that it wasn't so strict about the month being in braces. My understanding was that bibtex hardly did anything towards processing the references (when using biblatex) and so this seemed feasible. I gather in any case that this isn't an option.
Best Answer
The MONTH thing is special. Biblatex supports the old bibtex month strings like 'jan' 'feb' etc. as these are bibtex @STRINGS which expand to the right string for your language. It's the same in biblatex/biber.
To be more precise, biblatex only wants numbers for the months so it can replace them with language-specific strings in a general way (without relying on English @STRING macro names like 'jan'). Biber supporte these macros by turning them into numbers for biblatex in the .bbl.