BibTeX - History and Reimplementations

History and Reimplementations

BibTeX was created by Oren Patashnik and Leslie Lamport in 1985. It is written in WEB/Pascal. Version 0.98f was released in March 1985. With version 0.99c of February 1988, a stationary state was reached for 22 years. In March 2010, version 0.99d was released, and further releases were announced.

During Patashnik's inactivity 1988-2010, several reimplementations were published:

  • BibTeXu is a reimplementation of bibtex (by Yannis Haralambous and his students) that supports the UTF-8 character set. Taco Hoekwater has criticized it.
  • bibtex8 is a reimplementation of bibtex that supports 8-bit character sets.
  • CL-BibTeX is a completely compatible reimplementation of bibtex in Common Lisp, capable of using bibtex .bst files directly or converting them into human-readable Lisp .lbst files. CL-BibTeX supports Unicode in Unicode Lisp implementations, using any character set that Lisp knows about.
  • MLBibTeX a reimplementation of BibTeX focusing on multilingual features, by Jean-Michel Hufflen.
  • biblatex is a complete reimplementation. "It redesigns the way in which LaTeX interacts with BibTeX at a fairly fundamental level. With biblatex, BibTeX is only used to sort the bibliography and to generate labels. Instead of being implemented in BibTeX's style files, the formatting of the bibliography is entirely controlled by TeX macros."
  • Biber is a bibliography processing program for biblatex with a superset of BibTeX functionality, including Unicode 6.0 support, locale-sensitive sorting and UTF-8 citekeys.

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