Hey guys,
Now that the use of biblatex and loading of its bibliography databases
has been simplified by the introduction of BIBINPUTS, I was wondering if
you'd be interested in including a few words about it in the User Guide.
Something along these lines, perhaps:
6.5.3 Bibliography databases (BibLaTeX)
Bibliography ! Databases
Bibliography ! BibLaTeX
BibLaTeX is a modern and more powerful approach to managing
bibliographies. It is, unlike BibTeX that uses its own language for
formatting of the bibliography, entirely based on TeX macros, which
makes it easily configurable for anyone with a good knowledge of LaTeX.
It also employs a very capable bibliography processor, biber, that
enables the use of many bibliography sorting schemes, multiple
bibliographies within one document, their division by the document parts
(chapters, sections) or topics (keywords). BibLaTeX, with biber, fully
supports Unicode, and has been localized to many languages. The user
guide begins with Chapter 3 in the Package Documentation at
http://www.ctan.org/pkg/biblatex.
Even though it has no support for BibLaTeX built in, LyX can still be
made to use it with a few simple tricks. Detailed instructions can be
found at http://wiki.lyx.org/BibTeX/Biblatex.
I also notice that the title of the next subsection - "Bibliography
layout" is a bit vague. I think this should be
6.5.4 Citation format
Bibliography ! Citation format
To show you how easy it is to use biblatex now:
1) something like this goes into the preamble
\usepackage[style=authoryear,natbib=true,backend=biber,refsection=chapter]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{my_bibliography.bib}
2) Document>Settings>
Bibliography>Processor has to be changed to biber
Bibliography>Citation style to Natbib
Local Layout "Provides natbib 1"
3) Insert→List/TOC→BibTeX Bibliography... into a comment, to trick LyX
into using its citation infrastructure
4) ERT for \bibbysection (or \printbibliography)
A few easy steps (that could probably be automated with just a switch
in document settings: bibtex/biblatex, huh?) for a fair amount of
support of biblatex!
A template, similar (but simpler) to what I had already uploaded at
http://wiki.lyx.org/BibTeX/Biblatex can/will be made to work as-is.
