Add an option to make et al. italic

[veraverto]

It would be great to add an option to biblatex which writes the et al. in italic text. This would make a manual modification of style files unnecessary.

[moewew]

Thank you for that suggestion.

I'm not too sure if we really need an option here. But something like

\documentclass[british]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}

\usepackage[style=authoryear, backend=biber]{biblatex}

\newcommand*{\mkbibetal}[1]{#1}

\renewbibmacro*{name:andothers}{%
  \ifboolexpr{
    test {\ifnumequal{\value{listcount}}{\value{liststop}}}
    and
    test \ifmorenames
  }
    {\ifnumgreater{\value{liststop}}{1}
       {\finalandcomma}
       {}%
     \printdelim{andothersdelim}\bibstring[\mkbibetal]{andothers}}
    {}}

\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}

\begin{document}
\cite{sigfridsson,aksin}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

might work.

Of course you can always just add the italics to the bibstring.

\documentclass[british]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}

\usepackage[style=authoryear, backend=biber]{biblatex}

\DefineBibliographyStrings{english}{
  andothers = {\mkbibemph{et\addabbrvspace al\adddot}}
}

\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}

\begin{document}
\cite{sigfridsson,aksin}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

That is also not that much work.

Related #555, discussion in #552 as well as several TeX.SX questions (a recent one touching upon this subject would be https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/495844/35864, the big one https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/40798/35864, there is also https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/352114/35864, some of these have some more discussions in the comments).

[veraverto]

Thank you for your advice! I see that it is possible to change the bibstring quite easily and I am unsure if an option for this is useful in general. I thought a distinct option would make Biblatex more user friendly.

[moewew]

Since this request comes up from time to time I was thinking about implementing a \mkbibetal (or similar) as shown in the first code block so that a user would just have to add the single line

\renewcommand*{\mkbibetal}{\mkbibitalic}

to her document to get italic "et al."s. I'm just not too sure whether or not to reuse the command \mkibid used by some verbose styles or if this should be a new command with a new name. And if it should have a new name, which? \mkandothers, \mkbibandothers? biblatex alternates between \mkbib... and \mk.... Obviously the \mkbib.... names are 'safer'. (At the moment I gravitate towards using the new name \mkbibandothers.)

---

My comment about the option was specifically about implementing a feature like this as a package option. I believe that some customisation features benefit from being set up not as package options but via macros. Option handling is a bit tricky (especially with the pre-processing done to options from the LaTeX side) and options are often not as flexible as say macro redefinitions.

[moewew]

With #1028 merged you can get then desired effect in biblatex dev and the upcoming release with

\documentclass[british]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}

\usepackage[style=authoryear, backend=biber]{biblatex}

\DefineBibliographyExtras{british}{%
  \DeclareBibstringSet{latin}{andothers}%
  \DeclareBibstringSetFormat{latin}{\mkbibemph{#1}}}

\UndefineBibliographyExtras{british}{%
  \UndeclareBibstringSet{latin}}

\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}

\begin{document}
\autocite{sigfridsson,aksin}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

[christian-cahig]

With #1028 merged you can get then desired effect in biblatex dev and the upcoming release with

\documentclass[british]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}

\usepackage[style=authoryear, backend=biber]{biblatex}

\DefineBibliographyExtras{british}{%
  \DeclareBibstringSet{latin}{andothers}%
  \DeclareBibstringSetFormat{latin}{\mkbibemph{#1}}}

\UndefineBibliographyExtras{british}{%
  \UndeclareBibstringSet{latin}}

\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}

\begin{document}
\autocite{sigfridsson,aksin}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

@moewew will this also italicize "et al."s in the bibliography?

[moewew]

Yes. This formatting is a property of the string (in a certain language) and is applied whenever the string is used, no matter if in citations or the bibliography.

The output from the MWE above with the current dev branch is

Aksın et al. 2006

in the citation and

Aksın, Özge et al. (2006).

in the bibliography

[christian-cahig]

@moewew wow that's great. I can't wait to try it when 3.17 comes out. I'm currently using 3.16, and I don't think I can use dev features via MikTeX.

[moewew]

biblatex 3.17 is out now, the example from #899 (comment) works as shown there.