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I am reading the principal documentation on biblatex, and I am curious about the section 2.1.3 Unsupported Types, which lists entry types for which "the standard bibliography styles provide no support". But then why these types are listed at all is never mentioned. E.g., why they do not include the type @MyNiceCustomType, which, like all these unsupported types, will be mapped to @misc? My guess is that these types might be used by some non-standard bibliography styles, but then the formulation is somewhat misleading - shouldn't it be then Non-standard types rather than Unsupported types?

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    Just a guess: They are useful markup and some special style in some specific field might even display them other than as misc-type entry types, but for the standard setup they are only unsupported markup.
    – TeXnician
    Commented May 31, 2018 at 9:33
  • Since this question was asked, the documentation has been changed to say "Non-standard types" instead (by suggestion of @moewe).
    – August Janse
    Commented Nov 28, 2019 at 11:22

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The unsupported label might have been a bit unfortunate in that regard. Indeed I assume that the main purpose of listing these types is to provide some kind of official guidance or usable framework for custom styles, even though the standard styles do not have anything specifically set up for these types.

Since the "unsupported" seems to have thrown people off, the section was renamed from "unsupported" types to "non-standard" in df4444b following discussions in https://github.com/plk/biblatex/issues/753. There was no functional change to the data model or the styles for that discussion.

Biber happily passes through all entry types, even those unknown in to the data model, to biblatex. See https://github.com/plk/biber/issues/242. This is another recent-ish change that means that for many basic intents and purposes it doesn't matter if an entry type is known to the data model or not. Previously Biber would remap types unknown to the data model to @misc. (In the terminology of What exactly is the relationship Biblatex refers to as an alias of an entry type? And how should the formatting of aliased entry types be configured? that would have been a hard Biber-side mapping and not the soft biblatex-side alias that applied to entry types known to the data model without driver.)

Consider the following MWE

\documentclass[british]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}

\usepackage[style=authoryear, backend=biber, dashed=false]{biblatex}

%\usepackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@book{appleby1,
  author   = {Humphrey Appleby},
  title    = {On the Importance of the Civil Service},
  subtitle = {The Book},
  date     = {1981},
}
@software{appleby2,
  author   = {Humphrey Appleby},
  title    = {On the Importance of the Civil Service},
  subtitle = {The Software},
  date     = {1982},
}
@flobbel{appleby3,
  author   = {Humphrey Appleby},
  title    = {On the Importance of the Civil Service},
  subtitle = {The Nonsense},
  date     = {1983},
}
\end{filecontents}

\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}
\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}

\DeclareFieldFormat{entrytype}{\texttt{@#1}}
\renewbibmacro*{begentry}{\printtext{Hello, I'm a \printfield{entrytype}}\newunit}

\begin{document}
\cite{appleby1,appleby2,appleby3}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

Hello, I’m a @book. Appleby, Humphrey (1981). On the Importance of the Civil Service. The Book.//Hello, I’m a @software. Appleby, Humphrey (1982). On the Importance of the Civil Service. The Software.//Hello, I’m a @flobbel. Appleby, Humphrey (1983). On the Importance of the Civil Service. The Nonsense.

See also my comment in https://github.com/force11/force11-sciwg/issues/48#issuecomment-371871401

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