The biblatex package is a complete reimplementation of the bibliographic facilities provided by LaTeX in conjunction with BibTeX. It redesigns the way in which LaTeX interacts with BibTeX at a fairly fundamental level. With biblatex, BibTeX is only used (if it is used at all) to sort the bibliography and to generate labels. Instead of being implemented in BibTeX's style files, the formatting of the bibliography is entirely controlled by TeX macros. Good working knowledge in LaTeX should be sufficient to design new bibliography and citation styles — there is no need to learn BibTeX’s postfix stack language. Just like the bibliography styles, all citation commands may be freely (re)defined.

In fact, users need not remain bound to BibTeX for use with biblatex: an alternative bibliography processor biblatex-biber is available. Development of biblatex and biblatex-biber is closely coupled.

The package needs e-TeX, and uses the author’s etoolbox and logreq packages. For users of biblatex-biber, version 0.9 is required (at least; refer to the notes for the version of biblatex-biber that you are using).

Apart from the features unique to biblatex, the package also incorporates core features of the following packages: babelbib, bibtopic, bibunits, chapterbib, cite, inlinebib, mcite and mciteplus, mlbib, multibib, splitbib. There are also some conceptual parallels to the natbib and amsrefs packages. The biblatex package supports split bibliographies, multiple bibliographies within one document, and separate lists of bibliographic shorthands. Bibliographies may be subdivided into parts (by chapter, by section, etc.) and/or segmented by topics (by type, by keyword, etc.). The package is fully localized and can interface with the babel package.

The author is Philipp Lehman. The package is Copyright © 2006-2009 Philipp Lehman.