[XeTeX] polyglossia and biblatex

[Gildas Hamel]

* Niels Grewe (niels.grewe at halbordnung.de) wrote:
  |>  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!)
  |>  

Instead of Babel commands (\selectlanguage{german}), use environment \begin{german}...\end{german} to wrap the first section, including the bibliography, and nothing for your second section (not even \selectlanguage{british}, since it is the default in your example). HTH,
--Gildas