[XeTeX] polyglossia and biblatex

[Niels Grewe]

Hello all,

I recently encountered a little problem with the interaction of
polyglossia and biblatex. (XeLaTeX and polyglossia from TeX Live 2009,
and a recent version of biblatex) The task at hand is to produce per-chapter
bibliographies in different languages, which biblatex handles nicely
when using babel. With polyglossia, the formating and labels of the
bibliography are not correctly localized after language switches.
Strangely enough, this only happens if one tries to switch from certain
languages to another (e.g. from german to english) but not the other way
around. The example below (using examples.bib, which comes with
biblatex) illustrates the problem:


%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[british,german]{polyglossia} % Change to 'babel' for this to work
\usepackage[refsection=section]{biblatex}
\bibliography{examples}

\begin{document}

\selectlanguage{german} % interchange 'german' and 'british' for this to work
\section{Foo}
Note\autocite{westfahl:space}
Note\autocite{angenendt}
Note\autocite{augustine}
\printbibliography

\selectlanguage{british}
\section{Bar}
Note\autocite{westfahl:space}
Note\autocite{angenendt}
Note\autocite{augustine}
\printbibliography
\end{document}
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

I would really appreciate any help on this issue, especially since
going back to babel would cause problems for me (I'm extensively
using greek type in my document, which is just so much more fun with
XeLaTeX + polyglossia!)

Kind regards,


Niels