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 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.

The package needs e-TeX, and uses the author’s etoolbox package.

Apart from the features unique to biblatex, the package also incorporates core features of the following packages: babelbib, bibtopic, bibunits, chapterbib, cite, inlinebib, 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.