[tex4ht] Again biblatex

[Andrew Goldstone]

Today I hit the same error with biblatex and tex4ht described in this thread: footnote citation styles produce a "Missing \begin{document}" error in the tex4ht run. Just in case it's some help to the maintainers as they debug, may I mention a kludge which seems to help?

Noticing that the error had to do with the biblatex package variable \abx at aux@fnpage, I checked to see how biblatex.4ht treats this variable. Answer: not quite analogously to how it treats \abx at aux@page. So I tried simply adding the line

\let\abx at aux@fnpage\@gobbletwo

right after biblatex.4ht, l. 170 (this is in the biblatex.4ht in the trunk of the svn repository). Cf. biblatex.sty as well for the handling of this variable.

Now I can htlatex a test file, with footnote cites, and not get errors during the tex4ht run. The resulting HTML looks correct. Obviously I haven't tested this much, and I do not understand the underlying biblatex or tex4ht code. But maybe this idea will help zero in on the problem.

Now really I don't want to produce HTML but ODT. oolatex also runs without errors, and produces correct-looking footnotes. But there is a separate bug in oolatex's code for handling the list of references (\printbibliography), which comes out blank. I have some ideas about that, but that's for another thread.

Best,
Andrew Goldstone