In this question, people mention that biblatex requires biber to work. However, if biblatex has the option backend=biber, doesn't that mean that using biber is optional rather than mandatory?
2 Answers
Up until several (five or six?!) years ago, there was an age when the biblatex package was not yet as mature as it is now and the biber program was, ahem, less than perfectly stable and reliable. Understandably, the default back-end program (to perform sorting) was BibTeX. If one felt a bit adventurous and wanted to use biber, one could (and had to) specify backend=biber to override the default.
At some point, however, biber became the default back-end for biblatex, mainly because (a) it's much more powerful and versatile than BibTeX -- which is, after all, what biber was supposed to be all along -- and (b) biber eventually became sufficiently stable to be usable outside of, to put it delicately, experimental settings. Ever since this switch was made, it has technically speaking no longer been necessary to specify backend=biber if the intent is to use biber as the back-end. Conversely, if one nowadays really means to use BibTeX, one must specify backend=bibtex explicitly. A separate matter: there are by now some biblatex bibliography styles that require biber, i.e., they won't operate properly if BiBTeX is used.
As you probably know, though, old habits -- whether good or bad! -- are slow to die. Thus, many old hands, and quite few younger ones too, still write backend=biber even though it's no longer strictly necessary to do so if the plan is to use the program biber.
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+1) You might want to mention that a while ago,
biblatexwas rewritten to make BibTeX a legacy backend (i.e. one that should not be used for new documents any more and is kept around mainly for backwards compatibility). The documentation now does not mention explicitly which features are Biber only any more, as it assumes that people use Biber.– moeweNov 19, 2017 at 7:32 -
@moewe - Thanks. I seem to remember that there was a real discussion at some point (roughly 5 to 6 years ago?) whether
biblatexwould even be made to work at all with BibTeX going forward, i.e., whether the optionbackend=bibtexwould work at all. Thankfully (in my view; clearly, I don't claim to be speaking for anyone else...), though, the decision was made to preserve some backward compatibility -- in part, I suppose, to continue to be able to work with legacy documents. However, as you point out, for new bibliographies, the assumption should be thatbiberwill be used.– MicoNov 19, 2017 at 7:50 -
3+1 could change the bit about 'five or six years ago' to be an absolute reference?– cmhughesNov 19, 2017 at 7:58
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1@cmhughes - I'm afraid I haven't held on to the documentary evidence on this issue... (I.e., I'm pretty sure that it's more than 5 years ago, but less than about 7!) Feel free to undertake a thorough archeological dig. :-)– MicoNov 19, 2017 at 8:00
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It doesn't worry me that much, but reading this in years hence will lead to different interpretations (e.g. Imagine reading it in 2022)– cmhughesNov 19, 2017 at 9:23
As mentioned by Mico, biber is the default choice for backend but one can also give bibtex. As already detailed, that choice was made as Biber offers more features than BibTeX. It is worth noting, however, that biblatex continues to allow the use of BibTeX as a back-end (there are no plans to remove the support). One factor in this is that biblatex was originally written to use BibTeX and that for quite a large number of 'simple' use cases (large parts of natural sciences, for example) the outcomes are equivalent to those for Biber.
answered Nov 19, 2017 at 7:52
backend=bibtex, but you lose out on a lot of functionality. Some bibliography styles also require Biber nowadays.backendoption, so the defaultbackend=biberis used. That setting requires Biber to be run and not BibTeX. Of course another solution would have been to tell the OP to usebackend=bibtexand continue compiling with BibTeX. But BibTeX does not support all ofbiblatex's features and is considered a legacy backend. Thebiblatexdocumentation generally assumes Biber is used.