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

Joseph Wright joseph.wright at morningstar2.co.uk
Thu May 23 17:29:06 CEST 2013


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. More importantly, this did work in TL2012,
and I doubt I'm the only person who's used it! It's worth noting that
the limitation on keys also applies to other text when using BibTeX
(everything needs to be LaTeX-encoded), so I'd say the limitation on
labels doesn't really translate to Biber.

(I use my database primarily to track references as most of my docs are
not written in LaTeX. I'd prefer to be able to simply use the author
names 'as is' in a UTF-8 workflow when I am able to use LaTeX.)

>> \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 :-)]
-- 
Joseph Wright


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