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One of the benefits with natbib is that it allows you to customize with simple commands in the preamble how you want your citations to appear, with respect to what symbols to use between multiple citations, etc. I have not been able to find anything similar in biblatex.

To be concrete, using the authoryear style in biblatex will make citations appear as this:

"See e.g. Smith (1983, pages 255 sqq.); Jones (2001, pages 112 sq.); Anderson (2004, page 85)."

In my field, however, this is not how citations normally look. They will rather look like this:

"See e.g. Smith (1983:255ff.), Jones (2001:112f.), Anderson (2004:85)."

Is there any way I can customize these options in the preamble with biblatex?

Sverre
  • 20,729
  • biblatex comes with a variety of styles which are described in the biblatex documentation, plus there are some more styles available on CTAN. If that's not enoguh, you can create new styles / customize existing ones. – matth Aug 02 '12 at 12:25
  • @matth I have looked in the biblatex documentation, but could not find anything about customizing these things. Creating/customizing new styles is yet far beyond my abilities. The advantage with natbib is that it is very easy for users like me who are not that savvy in LaTeX programming, and I was hoping something similar would be possible with biblatex. – Sverre Aug 02 '12 at 12:48
  • Could you add a MWE? When I use biblatex with style=authoryear, citations do not look as described in your text. In that example you can use \addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib} or \addbibresource{xampl.bib} as bibliography, both should be available in every TeX distribution. And do you know you can add pre-notes and post-notes to the cite command? For example like this \cite[see e.g.][255ff]{bertram}. – matth Aug 02 '12 at 13:09

1 Answers1

8
\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[style=authoryear]{biblatex}

\renewcommand*{\postnotedelim}{\addcolon}

\DeclareFieldFormat{postnote}{#1}
\DeclareFieldFormat{multipostnote}{#1}

\renewcommand*{\sqspace}{}

\DefineBibliographyStrings{english}{%
  sequens = {f\adddot},
  sequentes = {ff\adddot},
}

\renewcommand*{\multicitedelim}{\addcomma\space}

\usepackage{filecontents}

\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@misc{Smi83,
  author = {Smith, S.},
  year = {1983},
  title = {Sierra},
}
@misc{Jon01,
  author = {Jones, J.},
  year = {2001},
  title = {Juliet},
}
\end{filecontents}

\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

\begin{document}

See e.g. \textcites[255\psqq]{Smi83}[112\psq]{Jon01}.

\printbibliography

\end{document}

enter image description here

lockstep
  • 250,273
  • That looks great. Do I understand it correctly that I don't need to add the stuff from \usepackage{filecontents} to \addbibresource{\jobname.bib} - that's just for illustrative purposes? – Sverre Aug 02 '12 at 13:22
  • @Sverre: That's for making my minimal example compile. :-) – lockstep Aug 02 '12 at 13:30
  • Got it. Your solution worked beautifully. – Sverre Aug 02 '12 at 13:37