Biblatex 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. Formatting of the bibliography is entirely controlled by TeX macros (the BibTeX-based mechanism embeds some parts of formatting in the BibTeX style file. Good working knowledge in LaTeX should be sufficient to design new bibliography and citation styles; nothing related to BibTeX’s language is needed.

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 present release of biblatex is designed to work with biblatex-biber version 0.9.6.

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. Biblatex supports split bibliographies and 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.).

Biblatex is fully localized and can interface with the babel.