Full `biblatex` support: somehow add `biber` engine to the backend

[pkgw]

It seems that some biblatex modes require the backend program biber as an alternative to bibtex. (Cf issue #33.) I don't know anything about it, but perhaps we should add it.

To gauge interest, everyone is invited to add a short comment on this issue if they use biber in their day-to-day TeX'ing.

[pkgw]

Here's biber. It's written in Perl. Hmmm.

[flying-sheep]

definitely. bibtex has no unicode support and is generally weird and flaky.

any modern LaTeX toolchain is LuaLaTeX/XeTeX + biber.

[mbollmann]

Just stumbled upon this project (wonderful idea!), but only recently switched to working with LuaLaTeX+biber (mainly because of Unicode support), so would definitely need this.

[jtojnar]

In the worst case, you could use the provided binaries (~20 MB).

[telemachus]

Just chiming in to say, yes please! I installed tectonic and I was very happy with the results overall. But sadly, my citations are not processed. They're simply left in bold after the build process. I would switch from latexmk to tectonic in a heartbeat if this was working.

If you decide not to include support for biblatex or for the time being, I'd suggest that if biblatex is present, the build should fail or output a clear warning that citations via biblatex aren't supported.

Thanks.

[pkgw]

OK, seems that this is a popular request. Anybody want to attempt to rewrite biber as a Rust crate? :-)

In the meantime I will consider pull requests that let Tectonic invoke the biber executable as in other TeX engines. This very much goes against the goal of reproducible, self-contained document compilations, but we should also be practical here.

[joostkremers]

I just found out about Tectonic and am tempted to give it a try, but this issue would really be a deal breaker for me.

But even more so, since you aim for a fully Unicode-enabled environment, you really cannot rely on BibTeX. BibTeX will fail in subtle ways when using Unicode: it may sort things incorrectly and you may end up with things like ä in your list of references. But since BibTeX doesn't produce any errors, you won't know unless you carefully examine the output.

goal of reproducible, self-contained document compilations

Do you have any ideas on how to deal with updates of packages? Updates fix bugs, which is good, but they may also wreak havoc on reproducibility, which is bad...

[pkgw]

@joostkremers Thanks; you make a good point — if we're going to say that we're Unicode-friendly, it matters to support it in .bib files as well as .tex.

As for package updates, Tectonic's "bundle" system tries to provide a framework in which you get both reproducibility and the capability to upgrade packages. This StackExchange comment elaborates a tiny bit more, but I need to write some real documentation that explains the concept in more detail.

[pkgw]

This might well be Google-able, but if anyone has a sample document using biblatex and biber in a nontrivial way, that they don't mind sharing, could you post a link to the files? I want to take a look at this and figure out how hard it would be to get the less-than-ideal "shell escape" solution working.

[jtojnar]

You can try one of the examples provided with fithesis. Though it uses some packages other than biblatex which might turn out to cause problems.

[joostkremers]

Well, perhaps this will help. Take the following .bib file:

@article{Haempke2002,
	author = {Hämpke, Johannes},
	title = {Irgendein Titel},
	journal = {Irgendein Journal},
	year = {2002},
	volume = {5},
	number = {6},
	pages = {7-8}
}

@article{Holbein2003,
	author = {Holbein, Frank},
	title = {Some Title},
	journal = {Some Journal},
	year = {2003},
	volume = {1},
	number = {2},
	pages = {3-4}
}

Note the author name Hämpke, which contains an umlaut.

Then use the following .tex file, which uses biblatex with BibTeX as backend:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[style=authoryear-comp,backend=bibtex]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{samp.bib}

\begin{document}

\textcite{Haempke2002, Holbein2003}

\printbibliography

\end{document}

I called the .bib file samp.bib. When you run this through xelatex --> bibtex --> xelatex, the result is this:

Note how in the list of references Hämpke is sorted after Holbein, even though according to German sorting rules (and indeed according to English sorting rules), their order should be reversed.

The biblatex manual says the following about using the BibTeX backend (I don't know what all of them really mean, TBH):

Key limitations of the BibTeX backend are:

• Sorting is global and is limited to Ascii ordering
• No re-encoding is possible and thus database entries must be in LICR form to work reliably
• The data model is fixed
• Cross-referencing is more limited and entry sets must be written into the .bib file
• Fixed memory capacity (using the --wolfgang option with bibtex8 is strongly recommended to minimize the likelihood of an issue here)

BTW, a quick test suggests that you may get better results using bibtex8 as backend. But I have no experience using biblatex / biber for documents that are not in English and have different sorting requirements (e.g., in Swedish, ä is a separate letter that is sorted after z), so I can't compare them to bibtex8.