This question led to a new package:
biblatex-trad
I'd like to use biblatex
while at the same time maintaining the bibliography format of the traditional BibTeX styles (plain
, abbrv
, unsrt
, alpha
). Looking at Guidelines for customizing biblatex styles, some of the necessary tweaks to the styles shipped with biblatex
seem rather straightforward, but others (e.g., shifting the location of the pages
field for @article
entries) are more tricky. What customizations of biblatex
are needed to emulate the traditional BibTeX styles as closely as possible?
Here's a compilable example for the plain
style displaying the entry types @article
, @book
, and @incollection
. (The [sometimes idiosyncratic] formatting of the BibTeX database is modelled after xampl.bib
which is part of most TeX distributions.)
\documentclass{article}
\newif\ifbiblatex
% \biblatextrue
\usepackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@article{A+01,
author = {Author, Aa and Buthor, Bb and Cuthor, Cc and Duthor, Dd},
title = {Title},
journal = {Journal title},
year = {2001},
volume = {1},
number = {2},
pages = {101--109},
month = jan,
note = {This is an article entry},
}
@book{A+02,
author = {Author, Aa and Buthor, Bb and Cuthor, Cc and Duthor, Dd},
title = {Title},
volume ={1},
series = {Series},
publisher = {Publisher},
address = {Location},
edition = {First},
month = "1~" # jan,
year = {2002},
note = {This is a book entry}
}
@incollection{A+03,
author = {Author, Aa and Buthor, Bb and Cuthor, Cc and Duthor, Dd},
title = {Title},
editor = {Zuthor, Zz and Yuthor, Yy and Xuthor, Xx and Wuthor, Ww},
booktitle = {Book title},
number = {1},
series = {Series},
chapter = {2},
type = {Part},
pages = {101--109},
publisher = {Publisher},
address = {Location},
edition ={First},
month = jan,
year = {2003},
note = {This is an incollection entry},
}
\end{filecontents}
\ifbiblatex
\usepackage[style=numeric]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}
\fi
\begin{document}
\nocite{*}
\ifbiblatex
\printbibliography
\else
\bibliographystyle{plain}
\bibliography{\jobname}
\fi
\end{document}
Output if one uncomments \biblatextrue
:
plain
,unsrt
, etc bibliography styles?@Booklet
,@Manual
,@MastersThesis
, etc.)? AUCTeX gives me 14 entry types to choose from; worrying about all of them for each of the four styles seems like a fairly tedious task. Though maybe one answer per style would make people more inclined to give it a go (especially if they are users of one of those styles and would like an easy migration route tobiblatex
).@article
,@book
, and@incollection
will cover most cases b) I suspect that, apart from the differences outlined in my answer here, the tweaks will be the same (or at least similar) for the four styles c) If nobody else comes up with an answer, I'll have a go at it.xampl.bib
is not a sufficient test file, becuase there are also differences in the treatment of multiple-author works.