[tex-live] TL2013: Biber not working with labels containing accents

Kime Philip philkime at kime.org.uk
Thu May 23 19:00:30 CEST 2013


This is rather safe and it's been part of biber for years. I modified libttparse to pass through UTF-8 so biber could do the UTF-8 work. It's not really a "change" in anything as bibtex+biblatex doesn't handle it, naturally. Only biber does this and even then, it'll work with pdflatex if you aren't using anything outside of the inputenc pseudo-utf8 range. Even then, biber can also dynamically recode everything back into TeX macros if you need to.

When the next major biber+biblatex release is done (multiscript support for script/language variants of fields within the same entry, involving another extension of the .bib format, but backwards compatible), I will look in earnest at the long-promised "biblatexml" XML format which biber already reads but which isn't documented and needs tidying up. I can't see biber ever dropping .bib format support though.

PK

On 23 May 2013, at 6:06 PM, Adam R. Maxwell <amaxwell at mac.com> wrote:

> 
> 
> On May 23, 2013, at 8:29, Joseph Wright <joseph.wright at morningstar2.co.uk> wrote:
> 
>> On 23/05/2013 16:11, Adam R. Maxwell wrote:
>>> 
>>> On May 23, 2013, at 02:17 , Joseph Wright <joseph.wright at morningstar2.co.uk> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Hello all,
>>>> 
>>>> I'm not sure if this is a change in Biber or one linked to TL2013, but
>>>> with the current pretest I find that Biber doesn't find the database
>>>> entry with example
>>>> 
>>>> %!TeX program = LuaLaTeX
>>> 
>>> Is this specific to LuaLaTeX? My understanding from TLC2 is
>>> that non-ASCII characters are not allowed in TeX labels, which
>>> is why libbtparse chokes on them in cite keys.
>> 
>> Accents in keys only work reliably with UTF-8 engines, but as Biber is
>> UTF-8 and both XeTeX and LuaTeX are also, allowing accents here in those
>> cases is not unreasonable.
> 
> Does it work with XeTeX, then? I use pdflatex often enough that I default to the least common denominator, so never tried it. Allowing accents in labels/commands seems like a big change.
> 
>>>> \documentclass{article}
>>>> \usepackage{filecontents}
>>>> \begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
>>>> @ARTICLE{Savéant2012,
>>> 
>>> I look forward to the gripes about BibDesk's lack of support
>>> for another bastardization of BibTeX :(.
>> 
>> I use JabRef, so can't comment directly. 'Out of the box' JabRef will
>> indeed complain about accents in labels, but this can be turned off.
>> [Does BibDesk complain about other use of non-ASCII characters? JabRef
>> doesn't, which is probably inconsistent :-)]
> 
> Only in cite keys and field names, as I recall; that's an error, also, not just a warning, and the parser just stops. We do translation to and from Unicode and TeX escapes in the content of fields, though that can be disabled.
> 
> I do wish that biber files were something other than .bib files.
> 
> -- 
> adam
> 

--
Dr Philip Kime




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