Trying to use biblatex-historian with a BibTeX backend and XeLaTeX

Question

I'm currently working with a large bibliography that I've assembled for my PhD studies that I've edited in several different programs (KBibTeX, JabRef, and ebib from emacs primarily) and that was annoyingly rendered non-compliant with unicode by KBibTeX (I think). This means that I can only compile documents referencing it with XeLaTeX. I'm okay with this, and I'm not even sure it's relevant to the problem I'm having.

The problem is that when I compile the document with this header:

\documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{scrartcl}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[citestyle=authoryear, bibstyle=mla, backend=bibtex]{biblatex}
\bibliography{General}

it works, but once I change it to bibstyle=historian, it can't find the document. I am running the standard Arch Linux package of TexLive, with the package including the Historian package installed. Any ideas what the issue is?

You can't use inputenc with XeTeX. See Using XeLaTeX instead of pdfLaTeX. Also, bibtex can't really deal with a UTF-8 encoded bibliography, so you will need to use biber as your backend. Unfortunately this may also entail installing an up-to-date TeXLive system. See How to install "vanilla" TeXLive on Debian or Ubuntu? on this matter. — Alan Munn, May 12 '13 at 03:29
@AlanMunn The Arch repos have TL12 in. So that isn't an issue. — Seamus, May 26 '13 at 11:30
biblatex-historian is, unfortunately, woefully out of date. It stands at version 0.4, which was released for version v.0.9b. biblatex is now at version 2.6 (I'm actually still only using 2.5). So I would check your versions; it may be that your version of biblatex is too new to be used completely successfully with biblatex-historian. — jon, May 26 '13 at 18:45

score 2 · Answer 1 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:36

You are providing only a spare information. However there are some mistakes:

If you compile with XeLaTeX you need not load inputenc. See: Frequently loaded packages: Differences between pdfLaTeX and XeLaTeX
biblatex offers another command to load the bibliography database. Instead of \bibliography use \addbibresource whereby the extension of the file is needed.
The style historian requires the package csquotes.

Based on this information your header should be:

\documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{scrartcl}
%\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{fontenc}
\usepackage{csquotes}
\usepackage[citestyle=authoryear, bibstyle=mla, backend=bibtex]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{General.bib}

Here a MWE:

% arara: xelatex
% arara: biber
% arara: xelatex
% arara: xelatex
\documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{scrartcl}
 %\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{fontenc}
\usepackage{csquotes}
\usepackage[style=historian,maxbibnames=6,maxcitenames=1]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}
\begin{document}
\cite{knuth:ct:a}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

What version(s) does this work with? With biblatex 2.5 (using either biber [v1.5] or bibtex), e.g., it doesn't. My output is: Knuth, Donald E. The TEXbook. Volume A volumeof Computers & Typesetting. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1984. — jon, May 26 '13 at 18:51
@jon: You are getting an output. The rest depends on the OP ;-) — Marco Daniel, May 26 '13 at 18:56

Trying to use biblatex-historian with a BibTeX backend and XeLaTeX

1 Answers1