Support of polyglossia

[asaen]

AFAIK, there is still no support of polyglossia package. Could you, please, add it?

This feature request is based on tex.stackexchange question - http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/89882/multilingual-bibliography-using-xetex-biblatex-and-polyglossia

Thanks in advance.

[plk]

Would like to but this is likely quite a task and won't be tackled in the near future I suspect. It's been on the list for a long time, from before the package author disappeared.

[odomanov]

Philipp said that the problem was the absence of a necessary interface in polyglossia and, more importantly, of the maintainer of polyglossia who could implement this interface. Now polyglossia does have a maintainer, so the problem might be solved, perhaps.

[yrammos]

Any progress so far? Thank you.

[plk]

Not yet and still not planned as I'm fully taken up with looking at multiscript support in biblatex 3.0. One good side effect of this is that I am more familiar with the babel interface in biblatex which is necessary for looking at polyglossia support.

[plk]

This is now being looked at and is provisionally planned for version 3.0.

[plk]

@aboruvka, @josephwright - I have started to look at this and it seems to be rather tricky. Ignoring the problems patching polyglossia >1.2 due to luatex code in the target macros, I have been trying to find a place to insert the same macro call as we use in babel:

\blx@langsetup{#1}

somewhere suitable in polyglossia but clearly there is a fundamental issue here as nomatter where I put this, the bibstrings are never changed. The correct .lbx is being loaded, this is obvious from the log but the strings are never switched. Now, the lbx loading routines in biblatex are rather esoteric in terms of groups see the macro \blx@lbxinput@ii which has some exciting mixtures of \bgroup/\egroup and normal groups which I don't really understand yet. I'd appreciate any insights you might have. I will run a trace but last time I did this, it took 20 minutes with no sign of stopping, even if just wrapped round the relevant place, probably due to all the bibstring settings.

PL said that polyglossia lacked hooks in the right places but it seems to me a bit more problematic than that - I've tried manually inserting the biblatex macro just about everywhere sensible and nothing seems to work.

[aboruvka]

I had a look back in April and decided I wouldn't be much help. Back then string language switching was possible with Oleg's citation hooks, but none of the babel-like patches appear to work now with polyglossia 1.3.

[plk]

I don't think they ever worked with polyglossia - the "support" was limited to just getting the patching to work at all so polyglossia can load. polyglossia internals are quite simple compared to babel but I can't work out why the switching doesn't work ... I'll investigate more but perhaps @josephwright can have a look - he's sure to be more useful in these low-level tricky issues than me ...

[plk]

We now have a idea about this - the current dev branch and uploaded 2.8 DEV version on SF contains a fix which so far seems to work. Please try it and put any comments here.

[odomanov]

This code yields
LaTeX Error: Command \nobreakspace unavailable in encoding EU1.

(2.8 dev, texlive 2013, windows 7).

\documentclass[12pt,a4paper]{article}
\usepackage{xunicode}
\usepackage{fontspec}

\usepackage{polyglossia}
\setdefaultlanguage{english}\setotherlanguages{german,french}%,british,american}

\setmainfont{DejaVu Serif}
\setsansfont{DejaVu Sans}
\setmonofont{DejaVu Sans Mono}

\usepackage[language=auto,babel=other]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}

\begin{document}
\selectlanguage{german}Gemäß
\selectlanguage{english}english
\selectlanguage{french}âgé

\nocite{*}

\printbibliography
\end{document}

[plk]

That's because you're using \usepackage{xunicode} which you don't need I think. Without that it works.

[plk]

There is some problem with polyglossia .ldf file loading still though it seems, looking into it.

[odomanov]

Ah, yes, sorry. This was indeed a problem with xunicode.

[plk]

You can try biblatex version 2.8 (needs biber 1.8) which has just been released (not in TL yet though). Polyglossia is now working.

[odomanov]

Yes, this is what I wanted to add but forgot --- it works fine with this new version.

[plk]

@darkled - Could you try version 2.8 (with biber 1.8)? Polyglossia support is now mostly working.

[georgthegreat]

Works fine for me too (I'm using lualatex).

[asaen]

for me it works fine as well (I am using texlive 2013 / xelatex)

[georgthegreat]

Did you tried to compile large bibliographies with lualatex + biblatex + polyglossia?
Compilation of my 66-paged bibliography crashes when memory usage exceed 2 GB.

[plk]

Hmm, no - can you ask this on TSE? This sounds like a LuaLaTeX issue ...

[georgthegreat]

I've already posted to TSE, but I haven't got any answer yet.

[odomanov]

I ran into a similar issue with xelatex. I don't really know what is responsible for that. It's not exactly about long bibliographies (I compiled succesfully a long one) but somehow about complicated documents. They are compiled fine with babel, but not with polyglossia.

[georgthegreat]

I've tested a combination of lualatex + babel (instead of polyglossia).
Everything is working fine, memory usage is about 400MB, this is acceptable for me.

So, I think, this bug needs reopening, but it is for @plk to decide.

[plk]

Hmm - do you see anything strange in the log for the polyglossia example, for example errors about \end called inside a group?

[georgthegreat]

I'll run some experiments with polyglossia/babel and lualatex on the weekend. I'll place links to the logs here.

[georgthegreat]

It seems that compilation with polyglossia is working once again — and (you wouldn't believe!) I didn't do anything (to start the investigation with).

Generating .aux file seems to be quite memory-exhausting, but I'm not sure, if I can safely disable it (for the second run of lualatex.

I've placed the log here, but I don't think there is anything interesting inside:
https://gist.github.com/georgthegreat/7386134