Should I move to biber? Should I move to biblatex?

Question

I've been using LaTeX and BibTeX since 1985. Over the past year or so I've noticed that a lot of the examples I'm finding online are using biblatex, a nearly complete reimplementation of BibTeX in LaTeX, and biber, another nearly complete reimplementation of BibTeX. I know that biblatex can be used with either bibtex or with biber. And all come with the standard LaTeX distribution now.

So my question:

Should I move from bibtex and pdflatex to biblatex?
Should I move from bibtex to biber?
Should I move from bibtex to both biblatex and biber?
What should I worry about?

If bibTeX is sufficient for your documents, why not stick to it? — Uwe Ziegenhagen, Sep 06 '13 at 13:10
See also Biblatex: submitting to a journal and bibtex vs. biber and biblatex vs. natbib. So if bibtex and friends still work for you, you should probably stick with it, especially if you submit your work to journals. Switching to bilatex with bibtex (and no biber) is in my mind not a good option. — moewe, Sep 06 '13 at 13:19
See http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/25701/bibtex-vs-biber-and-biblatex-vs-natbib and http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/8411/what-is-the-difference-between-bibtex-and-biblatex — StrongBad, Sep 06 '13 at 13:20
Choosing biblatex means, nowadays, also using Biber, as there are many features of the package that BibTeX can't cope with. — egreg, Sep 06 '13 at 13:20
@moewe There are perfectly good reasons for using biblatex with BibTeX (or rather not requiring BibTeX). You get the customisation in documents rather than needing to hack .bst files, and quite a lot of the useful stuff works without Biber. — Joseph Wright, Sep 06 '13 at 13:39

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 26 '20 at 08:44

Biber can only be used with biblatex. The traditional BibTeX approach with \bibliographstyle is incompatible with Biber. This means there is no moving from BibTeX to Biber without also moving to biblatex.

So your options are to use

BibTeX with \bibliographystyle,
biblatex with BibTeX, or
biblatex with Biber.

Using biblatex with BibTeX gives you the worst of both worlds: Some fancy biblatex features are only available with Biber, while most – if not all – drawbacks of the biblatex approach are still present if you use BibTeX. (For example in Biblatex: submitting to a journal it really doesn't matter a great deal whether you use BibTeX or Biber as biblatex backend: The publisher will still have to use a different workflow for biblatex bibliographies.) The development of new biblatex features generally assumes Biber is being used as a backend. Sometimes it is possible to implement some of these features also with BibTeX as backend, but it is not top priority to find a way to do that if it is more tricky.

It is true that Biber is generally slower than BibTeX and a bit more picky about your .bib files. I can't argue a lot against the fact that Biber is slower: I can only say that it is not necessary to run Biber every time you (re)compile your document. A build tool like latexmk will help you run Biber only if it is necessary. I see the fact that Biber is a bit more fussy about malformed .bib files as a plus, because in general Biber only complains about things that are wrong, i.e. that could cause trouble also with BibTeX, it's just that you might not have realised that there is an issue.

So I believe that nowadays the choice should be between the classical BibTeX approach with \bibliographystyle on one side and biblatex with Biber on the other.

My usual advice is that there is no reason to switch to biblatex (+Biber) if you are happy with what BibTeX (w/ \bibliographystyle) can give you at the moment. biblatex is generally not that well liked by publishers (who often have their own \bibliographystyles for BibTeX). Because it is still under active development it can sometimes be a bit of a pain if you want to use new features when you collaborate with others who are using older systems.

But there is a bunch of things that is so much easier with biblatex than with BibTeX: Mainly style adjustments, split bibliographies, on-the-fly data manipulation, ... If you need one of these features, then biblatex is usually your best bet of getting these things done.

score 2 · Answer 2 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:34

2

Based on Biblatex: submitting to a journal, it appears that I should not move to biber as I frequently submit to scientific journals.

However, it does seem that I should consider using biblatex.

edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:34

Community

1

answered Sep 06 '13 at 13:25

vy32

4,780

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Journals have fixed bibliography styles file anyway. So from your perspective it wouldn't matter if you emulate the journal style with biblatex or use directly bibtex. Your .bib file will be the same. The real power becomes evident when you design your own style just like you design your own template. Hence this shouldn't be a reason to stay away from biblatex and biber. – percusse Sep 06 '13 at 13:31
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That's a reason not to submit documents to journals using biblatex, but has nothing to do with your own documents. – Joseph Wright Sep 06 '13 at 13:40
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@percusse Well, I think you could run into problems if you started using biblatex-specific (such as \bibrangedash) commands in your .bib file, while still intending to use the same .bib file with bibtex (for journals, perhaps). No? – jub0bs Sep 06 '13 at 13:49
@JosephWright, what's that reason? – vy32 Sep 06 '13 at 13:56
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@Jubobs You shouldn't introduce range dashes or other nuances if the original style doesn't include them. The journal style should be followed faithfully (no matter how terrible they might be). So for scientific submissions emulation of the .bst file is wasted work if the journal doesn't support it unless you want to base your design over a journal style and customize it for your own templates. Hence, everytime a user asks a question about customizing a journal style for personal taste over a submission, I have a generic comment waiting for them :P – percusse Sep 06 '13 at 14:16
@percusse -- Depending on the context, I think there is more too it than you suggest. biblatex encourages a much saner markup approach to many things that simply doesn't work in BibTeX; e.g., title = {This Is a \mkbibquote{Complicated} Title}, --- which will correctly nest the quotation marks in a title field. The solution, I think, is not to not use those things in your bib file, but to create a dummy .sty file (say bibtex-compatibility.sty) to load that defines such commands for when you need to use BibTeX. Then you can still use biber+biblatex for other projects. – jon Sep 06 '13 at 16:12
@jon You simply can't submit that syntax to a journal. It will create problems. You have to fall back to bibtex. – percusse Sep 07 '13 at 00:06
@percusse -- Can you give an example? I thought this is what @preamble{...} tricks were for. (I ask only out of curiosity: no journal I submit to will accept any form of TeX, let alone any BibTeX/Biber compatibility issues?) – jon Sep 07 '13 at 00:59
@jon, most Elsevier journals accept LaTeX. You upload the .tex files and they run pdflatex on their backend. It's pretty neat. – vy32 Sep 07 '13 at 05:10
@vy32 -- True, but the only journal they publish that I know of that is also a viable venue for me is 'History of European Ideas' (there may be others). If I ever try to publish there, I will be very happy not to need to convert to MS Word! – jon Sep 07 '13 at 18:09
Several journals I use require MSWord. I usually prepare the manuscript with LaTeX and then convert to RTF using latex2rtf. – vy32 Sep 08 '13 at 00:53

Should I move to biber? Should I move to biblatex?

2 Answers2