Incompatibilities with texh4t

[simifilm]

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.

[plk]

I wasn't aware that bibaltex ever really worked properly with tex4ht ... did it?

[aboruvka]

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]

So should I file a bug with the tex4ht bug tracker?

[aboruvka]

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]

@simifilm While dealing with this TeX.SX question I found that biblatex support for recent versions in tex4ht is possible and has in fact been implemented. The relevant files (that is biblatex.4ht mainly, 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 tex4ht maintainers.

PS: It seems that most problems with the repository version of tex4ht are resolved by this
Tex4ht, biblatex and biber: what is proper processing?.

[simifilm]

Thanks, but AFAICS the new file doesn't make any difference.

[simifilm]

Could it be that the latest changes from dev have caused new incompatibilities?

[moewew]

Just checked it again, if I use htlatex test, biber test, htlatex test everything works like a charm (I could not use mk4ht because I didn't have a configuration file at hand.).

Did you also make sure that the new version of biblatex.4ht was actually loaded - the .log file reports the version, mine is 2015-02-04-14:23.

[simifilm]

Yes, the correct version of biblatex.4ht is loaded. The .bbl file which contains the relevant information is also loaded, but biblatex still insists that the citation Hiemenz is undefined. Which version of biblatex/biber did you use? I use the latest changes from dev branch.

[moewew]

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 .bbl file 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 about mk4ht, maybe it deletes temporary files before proceeding; as I said above, with htlatex it works fine, did you try that?

[simifilm]

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=0

[moewew]

Mhhhh, your .log file heavily suggest that something with the .bbl file 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 .bbl file.

Other than that you could try and downgrade to release versions of biblatex and Biber and try again, those worked here.

[simifilm]

Here's the .bbl file: https://www.dropbox.com/s/97h74o21lswbvsu/teste.bbl?dl=0

[simifilm]

Ok, it's definitely the changes from dev branch. With biblatex 2.9a everything works as it should.

[moewew]

OK, maybe you want to find out what commit exactly caused the trouble, if you can spare the time.