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

[Adam R. Maxwell]

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