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Incompatibilities with texh4t #310
Description
I don't know whether this belongs here or should go to the tex4ht bug tracker, but there are currently serious issues when trying to use biblatex and tex4ht.
Take the following MWE:
\documentclass{article}
\begin{filecontents}{test.bib}
@book{Hiemenz,
author={Hiemenz},
title={Polymer Chemistry}
}
\end{filecontents}
\usepackage{hyperref}
\usepackage[backend=biber, hyperref=auto, backref=true]{biblatex}
\bibliography{test}
\begin{document}
Here comes a quotation \cite{Hiemenz}.
\printbibliography
\end{document}
When running the sequence mk4ht oolatex tesfile – biber tesfile – mk4ht oolatex testfile, no error is produced, but the resulting ODT file doesn't contain the resolved citation.
And this is only with the simplest MWE. With a more complex document I get all kind of strange errors, which are rather hard to debug. I guess my real question is whether the respective developers are aware of the problems.
Activity
plk commentedon Mar 26, 2015
I wasn't aware that bibaltex ever really worked properly with tex4ht ... did it?
aboruvka commentedon Mar 26, 2015
It mostly did awhile back, but not since tex4ht's author (Eitan Gurari) passed away unexpectedly. Maintainers have volunteered, but the issues with biblatex that have cropped up are pretty involved - I wouldn't expect them to be fixed soon.
simifilm commentedon Mar 26, 2015
So should I file a bug with the tex4ht bug tracker?
aboruvka commentedon Mar 26, 2015
You could try. In the interim you could roll back to whatever version of biblatex/biber was around the last time Eitan updated tex4ht. From what I remember it worked fine as long as you weren't doing anything complicated with citation labels.
moewew commentedon Mar 27, 2015
@simifilm While dealing with this TeX.SX question I found that
biblatexsupport for recent versions intex4htis possible and has in fact been implemented. The relevant files (that isbiblatex.4htmainly, I imagine) don't seem to have made their way into an official release though (at least not in MikTeX), you can find a fairly new file at http://texdoc.net/texmf-dist/tex/generic/tex4ht/biblatex.4ht.Whether this is ready to be released so that all people can use it is something you could bring up with the
tex4htmaintainers.PS: It seems that most problems with the repository version of
tex4htare resolved by thisTex4ht, biblatex and biber: what is proper processing?.
simifilm commentedon Mar 27, 2015
Thanks, but AFAICS the new file doesn't make any difference.
simifilm commentedon Mar 27, 2015
Could it be that the latest changes from dev have caused new incompatibilities?
moewew commentedon Mar 28, 2015
Just checked it again, if I use
htlatex test,biber test,htlatex testeverything works like a charm (I could not usemk4htbecause I didn't have a configuration file at hand.).Did you also make sure that the new version of
biblatex.4htwas actually loaded - the.logfile reports the version, mine is2015-02-04-14:23.simifilm commentedon Mar 28, 2015
Yes, the correct version of
biblatex.4htis loaded. The.bblfile which contains the relevant information is also loaded, butbiblatexstill insists that the citationHiemenzis undefined. Which version ofbiblatex/biberdid you use? I use the latest changes from dev branch.moewew commentedon Mar 28, 2015
I use the current release version 2.9a with Biber 1.9. Of course I cannot be sure, but I wouldn't have thought that the changes since 2.9a to the dev branch will have caused such a loss in functionality.
When you say the
.bblfile which contains the relevant information was loaded, did you make sure that it at that point contained all the relevant information - I'm not sure aboutmk4ht, maybe it deletes temporary files before proceeding; as I said above, withhtlatexit works fine, did you try that?simifilm commentedon Mar 28, 2015
Last time I posted, I tried with
htlatex. I just tried it on a second machine with the same result (which is also is on dev branch). You can get the log file here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/qr2zggd7ha4wbvh/teste.log?dl=0moewew commentedon Mar 28, 2015
Mhhhh, your
.logfile heavily suggest that something with the.bblfile went wrong, even though it exists it does not seem to contain the information needed to resolve the citations.The warnings etc. we then see are then very similar to what one would expect if one didn't run Biber.
Check what's inside the
.bblfile.Other than that you could try and downgrade to release versions of
biblatexand Biber and try again, those worked here.simifilm commentedon Mar 29, 2015
Here's the
.bblfile: https://www.dropbox.com/s/97h74o21lswbvsu/teste.bbl?dl=0simifilm commentedon Mar 29, 2015
Ok, it's definitely the changes from dev branch. With
biblatex2.9a everything works as it should.moewew commentedon Mar 29, 2015
OK, maybe you want to find out what commit exactly caused the trouble, if you can spare the time.
plk commentedon Mar 29, 2015
I strongly suspect that if tex4ht adapted to the biblatex's new .bbl format a while ago where labelname was explicitly resolved by biber, then the DEV version change where I removed this and now do the resolving in biblatex is to blame. Maybe you can check if tex4ht expects to find an explicit labelname field in the .bbl?
moewew commentedon Mar 29, 2015
@simifilm I'm slightly confused about the
.bblfile you posted, it states$ biblatex bbl format version 2.4 $, but the dev version of Biber would make that read2.5instead, maybe you just ran into trouble because yourbiblatexand Biber versions are not compatible.@plk When I made
tex4htrun with an emptybiblatex.4htfile the output was slightly mangled, but otherwise OK, which makes me suspect thattex4htdoes not expect any funny things about the.bblfile or anything else and takes its information right from the properbiblatexfront ends.simifilm commentedon Mar 29, 2015
The irritating format version is probably caused by the fact that the
.bblfile changed in the meantime, since I've tried withbiblatex2.9a. Well, I guess we have located the problem. I'm not quite sure though what would be the best way to track down the specific change responsible for it.The MWE of this bug report was only the beginning for me, so to speak. I have a quite long document which produces all kind of other
biblatexerrors when I try compile it withtex4ht. But since it relies on a version ofbiblatex-fiwiwhich is adapted tobiblatex3.0, hunting bugs becomes a bit difficult ATM.moewew commentedon Mar 29, 2015
I thought since you said you use the dev version, you might have pulled it from github, you could then just go back the commits and find out which caused the problem (skipping those that only meddled with localization and documentation). The commit plk mentioned is the one from 2014-12-21, so if you were to pull the 2012-12-14 version and verify that it works and then the 2014-12-23 version and verify that it does not work we could isolate the problem.
simifilm commentedon Mar 30, 2015
I guess I'm too dumb for
git, but I'm not really sure how I can revert to a specific point.plk commentedon Mar 30, 2015
If you are using the git version and running "Build install" etc. then you can just make sure you are on the DEV branch (git checkout dev) and then checkout the specific commit using the hash mentioned on github. For the 2014-12-21 commit, that's "git checkout 1484ced". You can then "Build install" and when you want to go back to the latest commit of dev, just do "git checkout dev". There is also a nice command "git bisect" which automates finding the commit which broke something (see, for example, http://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Debugging-with-Git).
simifilm commentedon May 11, 2015
Just a short update: I was too stupid to exactly find the point where the relevant change was made, but the problem persists with biber 2.1/biblatex 3.0.
There are two additional errors, when running
tex4htwhich I think are related tobiblatex:simifilm commentedon May 11, 2015
I forgot this:
simifilm commentedon Jun 12, 2015
This is fixed on the tex4ht side, see here: https://puszcza.gnu.org.ua/bugs/?252