Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !

— section: Bibliographies and citations subsection: Creating bibliographies permalink: /FAQ-custbib date: 2014-06-10 —

# Creating a bibliography style

It _is_ possible to write your own: the standard bibliography styles are distributed in a form with many comments, and there is a description of the language in the BibTeX distribution (see [BibTeX documentation](/FAQ-BibTeXing)). However, it must be admitted that the language in which BibTeX styles are written is pretty obscure, and one would not recommend anyone who's not a confident programmer to write their own, though minor changes to an existing style may be within the grasp of many.

If your style isn't too far out, you can probably avoid programming it by using the facilities of the [`custom-bib`](https://ctan.org/pkg/custom-bib) bundle. The bundle contains a file `makebst.tex`, which runs you through a text menu to produce a file of instructions, which you can then use to generate your own `bst` file. This technique doesn't offer entirely new styles of document, but the [`custom-bib`](https://ctan.org/pkg/custom-bib)'s master BibTeX styles already offer significantly more than the BibTeX standard set.

An alternative, which is increasingly often recommended, to use [`biblatex`](/FAQ-biblatex). [`Biblatex`](https://ctan.org/pkg/Biblatex) offers many hooks for adjusting the format of the output of your basic BibTeX style, and a collection of contributed styles have also started to appear. Note however here are not as many of [`biblatex`](https://ctan.org/pkg/biblatex)'s contributed styles as there are for BibTeX, and there is no `custom-biblatex`, both of which suggest that beginners' röle models are hard to come by. As a result, beginners should probably resist the temptation to write their own contributed [`biblatex`](https://ctan.org/pkg/biblatex) style.