biber

biber [options] file[.bcf]

biber is a modern bibliography processor designed as a replacement for BibTeX, serving as the backend for the biblatex package in LaTeX documents. It provides advanced sorting, filtering, and Unicode support.Biber reads a .bcf (biblatex control file) generated by LaTeX and produces a .bbl file containing the formatted bibliography. It supports multiple bibliography databases and offers extensive configuration options.

--output-directory dir

Directory where output files will be written

Output to specific file instead of basename.bbl

Output format: bbl (default), dot, bibtex, biblatexml, bblxml

Character encoding for input files (default: UTF-8)

Character encoding for output files (default: UTF-8)

Run in tool mode to convert/process a single data source (.bib) without a .bcf control file

Validate data against the data model

Schema validate the .bcf control file

Log only errors; use twice to suppress all output

Enable low-level tracing for debugging (also turns on --debug)

Write log messages to specified file

Do not write any logfile

Display version number

Biber requires a .bcf file generated by running LaTeX with biblatex first. The typical workflow is: pdflatex -> biber -> pdflatex -> pdflatex. Biber is not a drop-in replacement for BibTeX; it requires the biblatex package.

Biber was first written by Francois Charette; Philip Kime joined the development in 2009 and made it into the full-featured backend it is today. Written in Perl, it addressed limitations in BibTeX, particularly around Unicode support and advanced sorting. It became the recommended backend for biblatex and is now the standard for modern LaTeX bibliography processing.

bibtex(1), pdflatex(1), latex(1)

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