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I have an article I have been writing with TeX Live on Ubuntu, but a change in circumstances has forced me to finish it on a Mac. Weirdly, the behavior of the bibliography is now very different. It insists on rendering article titles in German in ALL CAPS and in decapitalizing journal titles (i.e., "Tôhoku math. j. (2)," which is an abomination). What is causing this behavior? What can I do to overcome it?

[update: the promised MWE:

% !BIB TS-program = biber
% !BIB program = biber
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[backend=biber,style=ieee-alphabetic]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{bibshort.bib}\usepackage[english]{babel}
\begin{document}
\cite{hopf1941hopf}\cite{BV1982}.
\printbibliography[heading=bibintoc]
\end{document}

]

moewe
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jdc
  • 1,245
  • Mhh Biber should not do such a thing. It could be that something in your document produces this weird output, but it is unlikely. We really need an MWE. Do you get any errors or warnings in the .log or .blg file? – moewe May 18 '17 at 16:14
  • Still cutting down the MWE. Here's blg: https://pastebin.com/LfrGS6dp – jdc May 18 '17 at 16:17
  • Biber 2.4 is a bit outdated. The current version is 2.7. Other than that the .blg looks innocent enough. – moewe May 18 '17 at 16:19
  • log: https://pastebin.com/GbJTCNRX – jdc May 18 '17 at 16:20
  • Your biblatex and especially biblatex-ieee are also outdated. biblatex-ieee does some changes to capitalisation, I'm not sure if the old version you use had a bug related to that. – moewe May 18 '17 at 16:22
  • Added MWE. How to update? – jdc May 18 '17 at 16:32
  • It would be brilliant to see the .bib entries as well as the output. You can update MacTeX with tlmgr: https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/55437/35864 – moewe May 18 '17 at 16:33
  • Here are the two bib entries: https://pastebin.com/AgJdLmsR . I'll start trying to update this thing. – jdc May 18 '17 at 16:44
  • Try Title = {Classes caract{\'e}ristiques {\'e}quivariantes. {Formule} de localisation en cohomologie {\'e}quivariante}, and Title = {{\"U}ber eie {Topologie} der {Gruppen-Mannigfaltigkeiten} und ihre {Verallgemeinerungen}}, (BTW: Check the spelling of the last title, it's probably 'eine', not 'eie'). – moewe May 18 '17 at 16:45

1 Answers1

2

I can reproduce the problem. It is due to excessive bracing interfering with the macro for capitalisation. You'll want

title = {Classes caract{\'e}ristiques {\'e}quivariantes. {Formule} de localisation en cohomologie {\'e}quivariante},

and

title = {{\"U}ber eine {Topologie} der {Gruppen-Mannigfaltigkeiten} und ihre {Verallgemeinerungen}},
moewe
  • 175,683
  • Removing the spurious braces fixes the extra caps in Hopf's title, but still this does nothing for the capitalization of the journal names. How do they render for you? – jdc May 18 '17 at 16:51
  • @jdc Just fine as 'Ann. of Math.' Did one of the journals of the MWE cause trouble for you? – moewe May 18 '17 at 16:55
  • Both! They render, weirdly, as "C. r. acad. sci. paris, and "Ann. of math., Second Series." – jdc May 18 '17 at 16:58
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    @jdc Mhhh, as I said you have an older version of the package. – moewe May 18 '17 at 16:59
  • tlmgr needed to update itself, and now is starting to update 684 other things. Let us see... – jdc May 18 '17 at 17:01
  • @jdc Yes, let's. You could try \DeclareFieldFormat{titlecase}{#1}, but that is a mere hunch. – moewe May 18 '17 at 17:03
  • The sudo tlmgr update --all has been failing because I've been trapped at airports with intermittent, slow wifi for about a day now. It finally completed, but I worried it because of the interruptions, it broke something: when I try to compile it says pdftex.def not found. As for that \DeclareFieldFormat, that seems somewhat post hoc, no? The system should not need that kind of manual interference if it's working right, right? – jdc May 19 '17 at 12:02
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    @jdc No idea about your missing pdftex.def. Maybe you can try again or see https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/318453/35864 (in German, sorry: http://texwelt.de/wissen/fragen/19297/tex-live-2016-file-pdftexdef-not-found). Of course the \DeclareFieldFormat{titlecase}{#1} is ad hoc, it fixes a problem (or at least I hope it does) that is solved in the current version of the package. That was only meant to be a temporary solution in case you did not want to or could not update. – moewe May 19 '17 at 12:09
  • :Aha, I saw it too late. :/ The pdftex.def problem is persistent so I guess I'll try to fix that now. Thank you for all this help. – jdc May 19 '17 at 12:14
  • Let us continue this discussion in chat. – jdc May 19 '17 at 12:20