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I install from the internet TeX Live 2011. I have to use MLA to write all my papers, and I have this problem: biblatex-mla sometimes \autocite[prenote][pg]{key} is not printing the author's name

The problem is caused by a conflict between 2 packages. biblatex-mla works well with biblatex 1.0, and my current version of biblatex is 1.7.

Right now, I know that I need to use tlmgr to remove biblatex 1.7. My question is related with all the dependencies. According to the package manager I need to remove the whole collection of bibtexextra in order to remove biblatex. And I don't know what to do next:

Can I remove the package with (--no-depends) and then install manually biblatex 1.0? or

What is the best way to resolve this issue?

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    As you ask what is the best way to resolve the issue: Going back to a very old version can be a temporary workaround only. A real solution would be to file a bug report (in biblatex-mla, I guess), help in finding/removing the bug and then update to the newest version of both biblatex and biber. Of course, this may take some time, maybe a week or two. – matth Feb 25 '12 at 11:32
  • @matth Good advice, but "a week or two" might be a little optimistic in some cases. Apparently biblatex 2.0 will use biber as the sole backend. So this question will likely be useful for bibtex diehards down the road. – Audrey Feb 25 '12 at 14:31

2 Answers2

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Previous biblatex versions can be found at sourceforge.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/biblatex/files/

To refer to some locations in your (La)TeX distribution, we'll call $TEXMF* the path returned by the command

kpsewhich -var-value TEXMF*

To install, just extract a biblatex-1.x.tds.zip file into a tree of your (La)TeX distribution. Then run texhash. To easily maintain your existing biblatex installation, you can install 1.0 in $TEXMFHOME.

Obviously you'll have to avoid biblatex features added since 1.0. \addbibresource is just one example.

Most features of earlier releases are supported by bibtex. If you want to use biber as the backend, early versions of biber can be found at gitub. (Thanks to matth for pointing this out.)

https://github.com/plk/biber/tags

With biblatex 1.0, you'll want biber 0.6.5. You have to build biber from the source code as binaries appear to be available only for recent releases. Details can be found in the readme file. To install, just put the resulting biber binary into a folder where your system finds executable files. (La)TeX binaries are typically stored in a subfolder of $TEXMFROOT/bin.

David Carlisle
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Audrey
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This is how I installed biblatex 0.9a into TeX Live 2011.

I took advantage of TeX Live Manager (tlmgr). I opened a terminal, I log in as administrator with (su) [I am working with Linux] and then I went to /usr/local

Then I write this command: tlmgr --gui

At this point I was into a graphical version of tlmgr. The repository load by default is pointing the last version [TeX Live 2011], but it is possible to change this repository. Go to the tab tlmgr and select: load other repository.

I selected this: ftp://tug.org/historic/systems/texlive/2009/tlnet/

Then I removed biblatex 1.7 and collection-bibtexextra, and install biblatex 0.9a and collection-bibtexextra.

Finally I closed tlmgr. There is no need to run texhash, because tlmgr already did so.

Problem solved.

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