So, is BibLaTeX the future?

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So, is BibLaTeX the future?

(14 posts)

Chris E
Member

There was brief discussion in an earlier thread about one rather small and specific advantage of BibLaTeX. But I wonder more generally what the future holds for BibTeX and its descendants.

I've found that NatBib can be used to emulate nearly all Philosophy journals, so I'm getting into the rut of always using it. And I don't believe BibDesk supports BibLaTeX, so I'm not going to switch now. But I wonder about what we're all going to be using in 5 years.

Posted 1 year ago #
Kevin Klement
Key Master

I have a lot more experience with natbib too, and I agree that it usually does the trick. The only thing right now really tempting me to BibLaTeX right now is the ability to use UTF-8 (Unicode) encoding directly (for e.g., foreign accents in names, etc.). But it's hard to get too excited about that when I realize that if I did need to submit my bibliography to a publisher, they might not know how to handle Unicode-encoded files anyway, and so sticking with straight ASCII and LaTeX codes for accents is probably safer anyway.

But as for BibDesk, while I'm not that familiar with it, BibLaTeX can make use of your existing .bib files without modification, so it can probably work with BibDesk-created files as is without problem.

Posted 1 year ago #
Seamus Bradley
Member

BibLaTeX works with your standard bibtex/latex workflow, so there should be no problem using bibdesk with it. You can, however, replace bibtex with biber, the biblatex replacement which, as Kevin said, supports more unicode characters than does bibtex.

Advantages are probably minimal, and if you can do everything you want with bibtex, there's not much point in switching. That said, biblatex is in active development, the actual transition is pretty easy, and one does have a little more flexibility, so if you have a spare couple of hours, it might be worth having a go.

Can natbib do automatic replacement of repeated references with "ibid", "op.cit." etc? That's one funky thing biblatex does that I noticed recently... It can also apparently handle possessives in author (year) citation styles, though I've not tried it myself. [Though a simple Name's \citeyear{key} would seem such an obvious work around...]

I guess the main advantage of biblatex is going to be its support for more kinds of fields in the .bib file. This might be where bibdesk fails (I don't know what its capacities are like vis-à-vis custom fields). If you need fields for translator, book editor and series editor for instance, bibtex might break down (I don't know, I've forgotten all my bibtex-fu).

anyway, I think the main point in favour of biblatex is that the transition is fairly painless, though that's counterbalanced by inertia, and possible advanced natbib knowledge making you reluctant to change...

Posted 1 year ago #
Seamus Bradley
Member

Y'know what would be good? A "natbib to biblatex transition guide": step by step instructions to recreate any natbib style with biblatex... If it weren't for this whole "thesis" thing I'd be all over this...

Posted 1 year ago #
Kevin Klement
Key Master

Doesn't BibLaTeX have a natbib compatibility option, e.g.:

\usepackage[natbib=true]{biblatex}

so that you can use the regular \citet, \citep, etc., abbreviations a natbib user is used to? Other than adding \printbibliography, is there much else to know?

Posted 1 year ago #
Seamus Bradley
Member

Yeah biblatex has a natbib compatibility option, but my "transition guide" would be more answering the question "I used to do \bibliographystyle{chicago} how do I replicate that style in biblatex?"

There isn't all the much to know other than \printbibliography I don't think...

Posted 1 year ago #
Darrengarside
Member

This might be too simplistic for your purposes but there is a transition guide in the following thread

http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/5091/what-to-do-to-switch-to-biblatex

Posted 1 year ago #
Seamus Bradley
Member

Heh, I know about that guide: I wrote one of the answers.

I guess I was after more specific information about which natbib bibliography styles correspond to which biblatex styles...

Posted 1 year ago #
dvw
Member

Chris, You wrote: 'I've found that NatBib can be used to emulate nearly all Philosophy journals'. Tell me, how do you do that? I know that apalike can be used for some and that Ted Sider has a style for Analysis and one for the Philosophical Review on his page, but how do you adapt your bibliographies with NatBib to the styles of other journals? I use Biblatex and do not know yet how I can I adapt my bibliographies to the rules of the various journals. Daniel

Posted 1 year ago #
Kevin Klement
Key Master

I think of natbib as mainly useful for getting the internal citations to look the way they need to. If you're talking about the format of the bibliography itself, then either you need to find a style that's compatible, or create one. A relatively easy way of creating one is to run latex makebst from the command line and it'll walk you through multiple choice questions for creating a style, and the styles it creates are natbib-compatible (assuming you choose the right options). If it still isn't quite right, I'll usually just wait until it's time to submit the final version, and then edit the .bbl file directly when need be. (And swap out the \bibliography line with \input{filename.bbl}.)

Posted 1 year ago #
dvw
Member

Thank you, Kevin, that is very helpful. I hope people will publish their style files for biblatex too. It is doable but not little work to adapt a style in biblatex. Biblatex is now in version 1.4 and works very well. Daniel

Posted 1 year ago #
Seamus Bradley
Member

A word of warning. BibLaTeX might not be compatible with the tex distributions used by the journal internally. You may have to regress back to bibtex when you come to publish.

Posted 1 year ago #
Kevin Klement
Key Master

Ugh. Yeah, don't get me started on how out of date and/or incomplete journals' systems seem to be.

Posted 1 year ago #
Darrengarside
Member

Well I finally made the transition to biblatex-biber this weekend. For me definitely worth it for the simple reason that I can create chapter bibs and indexes with cross-refs using hyperref. I know in theory you could with chapter bib etc packages but I could never make it wor! I'm working on my thesis so it's vital to keep track of all internal referencing especially as I'm in the habit of dropping in verbatim refs if I haven't entered them into bibdesk. So the PdF looks like I've cited but the biblio is not showing the full entry. I'm also liking the @online type. My main problem was that Ubuntu's Texlive package was so out of date that I needed to bypass it and install Texlive 2010 from the prompt.

Posted 1 year ago #