Using biber with gedit + rubber

Question

I've been having a lot of problems trying to switch to biblatex with biber from bibtex, and after a few problems solved I'm at loss. The situation now:

• biblatex works when not using biber as a backend
• biber is installed (When I run biber --version I get biber version: 0.9.8)
• When running rubber (via the gedit latex plugin) on a document with biber as backend, nothing happens. I get no error, the document is continuously compiling but never finishes.

Here's a MWE:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[backend=biber]{biblatex}
\usepackage{geometry}

\addbibresource[datatype=bibtex]{bilbliography}

\begin{document}
\nocite{*}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

I'm running Fedora 16 and Gnome 3. Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong?

Answer 1

^{Disclaimer: This answer might be considered a hack, so there's no garantee to work for every document. :)}

egreg and I were talking in the TeX, LaTeX and Friends chat room about the possibility of extending rubber to use biber. This answer is only possible because of his insight. Grazie mille, egreg. :)

First of all, note that rubber does not seem to be maintained anymore. The latest stable version - which is 1.1 - was released in 2006. IMHO the development version is far from usable.

rubber can be extended through modules. Plain and simple, a rubber module is a Python script following certain rules. Unfortunately, those modules are quite "rare" to find.

I wrote a post in our community blog about rubber. There's a nice usage of a module. For example, rubber offers no XeLaTeX support out of the box, but thankfully Wouter Bolsterlee provided an elegant solution by writing a module for it.

That said, I'll document the process I did just for completeness sake.

rubber has a rules/latex directory where you can find other modules. I'm also on Fedora 16, the location of this directory is:

/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/rubber/rules/latex

My approach here is to use a similar module and adjust it to our purpose. If we list rules/latex, we find a bibtex.py file there which is registered in the __init__.py - it means rubber assumes bibtex by default.

What I did was copying bibtex.py to a new file biber.py. Since both programs seem to work similarly, I assume it's only a matter of replacing one by the other. Again, I had no time to inspect the file, so it's far from being stable or bullet proof! Besides, biber might have some other particularities which are not covered in this approach.

I opened biber.py - which is an exact copy of bibtex.py and searched for occurrences of bibtex, replacing it by biber, including messages and the system call. I kept the function names intact - but nothing that a proper refactoring can solve.

OK, now I have the module. Now I need a test document. I've never used biber before, so I had to rely on the following MWE from How to use biber:

\documentclass[]{article}

\usepackage[autostyle]{csquotes}

\usepackage[
    backend=biber,
    style=authoryear-icomp,
    sortlocale=de_DE,
    natbib=true,
    url=false, 
    doi=true,
    eprint=false
]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{mybib.bib}

\usepackage[]{hyperref}
\hypersetup{
    colorlinks=true,
}

\begin{document}
    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet~\citep{kastenholz}.
    At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum~\citet{sigfridsson}.
    \printbibliography 
\end{document}

Now, in my terminal, I navigated to my test directory with both document.tex and mybib.bib. I called the following command:

$ rubber --module=biber document

It's also possible to add a rubber directive in the top of the .tex file in order to call this module:

% rubber: module biber
\documentclass[]{article}
...

The output:

I checked the resulting document.pdf and all references were correctly displayed.

This dirty hack would require more tests, but so far it seems to work. :)

Answer 2

Couple of things:

1. You don't need to add the [datatype=bibtex] option to \addbibresource - that's the default
2. You need the full filename e.g. \addbibresource{bibliography.bib}. The optional arguments don't help with this.
3. Biber is not run on the .bib file, it's run on the .bcf file which is produced when you use the backend=biber option to biblatex. You can call biber on this file with or without the .bcf file extension.

Answer 3

It is possible to define rubber rules in the main tex file so that when the file is compiled and auxiliary files are produced/changed the biber command is triggered.

I have this in the top of my main.tex file:

% rubber: watch main.acn
% rubber: onchange main.acn 'makeglossaries main'

% rubber: watch main.bcf 
% rubber: onchange main.bcf 'biber main'

The first two lines are related with glossaries package (which I use to produce acronyms) and the second two lines are the ones necessary to call biber instead of the regular bibtex.

Do not forget that the backend=biber option is required in biblatex for this to work.

\usepackage[backend=biber]{biblatex}

I hope this is useful!