[OS X TeX] Improved support for biber in TeXShop

[Herbert Schulz]

On Jul 14, 2012, at 2:26 PM, Alan Munn wrote:

> On Jul 14, 2012, at 1:54 PM, Alan Munn wrote: > Now that TL 2012 is out (thanks Dick and all of the TeXLive folk), I thought I'd bring up an issue with TeXShop. > > Many of us are increasingly switching to biblatex for our bibliographies, and biblatex runs best with biber as the backend instead of bibtex. As it stands now, TeXShop has no simple way to switch between these backends on a per-document basis. This would be the most desirable behaviour since anyone using biblatex is likely to also have older documents that require bibtex, not to mention that sometimes a bibtex solution is necessary. > > In this Stackexchange question, http://tex.stackexchange.com/q/38348/2693 Mark Everitt provided a script that implements this idea quite nicely. > > The script source is here: https://github.com/qubyte/BibDirective > > I've been using this script myself, but it would be nice if something like it were actually incorporated into TeXShop directly. > On Jul 14, 2012, at 2:10 PM, Herb S
> chulz wrote: The latexmk engines will automatically switch to biber from bibtex if they (actually the latexmk program that all the engines depend upon) detect that it's being used.  Thanks, Herb, I'm aware of that but I certainly don't want to run latexmk all the time, (and I suspect others don't either) so this isn't really an ideal solution. Most of the time I want to minimize compilation time, and will only run biber/bibtex occasionally when working on a document. The advantage of a per-file directive is that I never need to change the engine. Alan

Howdy,

I wouldn't generalize to that others don't want to either; I know lots of folks that use pdflatexmk as their default engine. I tend to only use the latexmk engines essentially exclusively now. If a biber (or bibtex) run is not necessary the engines won't run biber/bibtex. I just took one of my files that tests biber with a bunch of bibliographic references. Ran it and biber ran. Then I just changed some text so that the bibliography didn't change and when I ran it there was a single run of pdflatex.

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest dot com)