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OVERVIEW

Biber is a sophisticated bibliography processing backend for the LaTeX biblatex package. It supports an unsurpassed feature set for automated conformance to complex bibliography style requirements such as labelling, sorting and name handling. It has comprehensive Unicode support.

Please note--the default download for all platforms is 64-bit. Please look in the files section for the correct 32-bit platform instead of using the default download button if you want 32-bit.

REQUIREMENTS

Biber is written in Perl with the aim of providing a customised and sophisticated data preparation backend for biblatex.

You do not need to install Perl to use biber--binaries are provided for many operating systems via the main TeX distributions (TeXLive, MacTeX, MiKTeX) and also via download from SourceForge.

You only need a Perl installation to use biber in one of the following cases:

  • A binary version is not available for your OS/platform.
  • You wish to keep up with all of the bleeding-edge git commits before they are packaged into a binary.

For the vast majority of users, using the latest binary for the OS/platform you are using will be what you want to do. For details on the requirements for installing the Perl program version, please see the biber PDF documentation.

The git repository for Biber is kept on github:

https://github.com/plk/biber

INSTALLING

If you wish to install from the source, make sure you have permissions to install Perl modules, get the source and from the top-level source directory, do:

perl Build.PL
./Build installdeps
./Build install

biber should now be available in your path, run biber --version to verify.

USEFUL ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES

There are a few environment variables for biber which are useful sometimes:

ISBN_RANGE_MESSAGE

biber uses the Perl Business::ISBN::Data module to verify ISBNs. This relies on a data file called RangeMessage.xml which comes with the module and which is packaged with biber. This can be updated quite regularly and the packaged version might be several months old. If you find yourself needing an updated version of this file (e.g. you have ISBN validation errors when using bibers --validate-datamodel option), then you can download a recent version from here: https://www.isbn-international.org/range_file_generation and point to the location with this environment variable.

PAR_GLOBAL_TMPDIR

When a new version of the binary version of biber first runs, it unpacks itself to location which is OS dependent but usually some sort of temporary location (which you can see with biber --cache). Sometimes, this causes problems because the OS might clean up files in the default location or you might not have permissions to unpack biber to the default location. You can use this environment variable to set the location of the unpack cache.

SUPPORT AND DOCUMENTATION

After installing, biber --help will give you the basic documentation.

The latest PDF documentation can be found here:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/biblatex-biber/files/biblatex-biber

More information, bugfix releases, forums and bug tracker are available at:

https://github.com/plk/biber

BUILDING

If you wish to build you own binary, see the main biber PDF documentation and particularly the included BUILDERS.README file The PDF documentation is in the documentation folder for the release on Sourceforge.

LICENCE

Copyright 2009-2024 François Charette and Philip Kime, all rights reserved.

This module is free software. You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the Artistic License 2.0.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty; without even the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.