ISO 690:2021 Biblatex Bibliography Style (Beta Version)

Why and How:

About two years ago, in the middle of 2021, the ISO 690 got a huge update (see #83 and https://www.iso.org/standard/72642.html). From quite a small document that hardly explained how bibliography entries should look like and let a lot of space for interpretation the standard was extended to a whopping 160 main pages document with very sophisicated explanations.

It's now a little more than over a year ago that I got my hands on that document via my university subscriptions and I started going through it. So while working on my thesis I occasionly took some time off to read a new paragraph here and there. When I was reading I also nearly always took some time to code a few new things for this biblatex style because I wanted to help improving it. It turned out quickly that too many things have changed or rather added and extended so that it would get to messy to add them to our current implementation. So instead, I decided to take an approach that strictly followed the structure of the new ISO 690 standard and implemented things in a plain document by copying the corresponding things we have implemented so far and then modify or extend them according to the new proposed rules. As you can see in my latest PR (#124), over time I got quite ambitious with that.

Here it is, a biblatex beta version of the latest ISO 690:2021 standard:

So today I present you an already functional, but sill rather incomplete, biblatex beta version of the latest ISO 690:2021 standard. As a matter of fact I have only gone through half of the new standard so far, i.e. I basically just read it until the end of chapter 7, which describes the basic data elements. However, since putting all these data elements together to entry types allowed me to create a biblatex style already, I thought it would be the best time to publish it. In my opinion it is a good base to start with if we want to go through the even more detailed descriptions of chapter 8 of the standard, which seems to contain very exact definitions for the specific elements of each and every resource category. Hence I expect a lot more things adding up to an already not that short TODO-list, which I created. For all those of you who want to try the new standard, feel free to do so.

:warning::warning: I need to WARN you :warning::warning:

But be warned here: If you don't have time to closely check the outputs of this beta version, you will very propably end up with at least some of your bibliography entries looking ugly or worse, even buggy. Having said this, expect the style to be error-prone. So if the document you work on is of any importance to you, at the current point in time you are way better off and I would highly recommend you to continue to go with our well tested current implementation of the previous ISO 690 standard instead of blindly trusting the hardly tested beta version of the new latest standard.

Please support by testing and report your findings!

Nevertheless, if you can live with some possible glitches that are pretty likely to appear or if you have enough time to check your output manually and carefully, then please go for it, report your results and help us testing the implementation of the new standard. In fact, I opened this issue as a disscussion for all those who will try the beta version, for all those who have some issues with it that we might be able to fix quickly and for all those who want to make some suggestions of what to improve or maybe even on how to improve it.

Looking forward to your feedback, it will be highly appreciated.

michal-h21 / biblatex-iso690