Biblatex is a complete reimplementation of the bibliographic facilities provided by LaTeX in conjunction with BibTeX. It redesigns the way in which LaTeX interacts with BibTeX at a fairly fundamental level. With biblatex, BibTeX is only used (if it is used at all) to sort the bibliography and to generate labels. Formatting of the bibliography is entirely controlled by TeX macros (the BibTeX-based mechanism embeds some parts of formatting in the BibTeX style file. Good working knowledge in LaTeX should be sufficient to design new bibliography and citation styles; nothing related to BibTeX’s language is needed.