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I recently upgraded my LaTeX packages via MikTeX. Afterwards, not even the simplest document will compile with pdfLaTeX as soon as I load biblatex. According to the package information I have version 3.16 installed. The error message I get is

! LaTeX Error: Missing \begin{document}.

See the LaTeX manual or LaTeX Companion for explanation.
Type  H <return>  for immediate help.
 ...


l.202 b
       lx@packageincompatibility

The solution from this thread had no effect. If I comment out the line

blx@packageincompatibility

in biblatex.sty (line 202 in V3.16) everything works fine. The thing is, I did not load any of the packages that biblatex checks for incompatibility.

Any hints?

MWE

\documentclass{article}

% https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/413899
% \usepackage{etoolbox}
% \makeatletter
% \long\def\etb@listitem#1#2{%
%   \expandafter\ifblank\expandafter{@gobble#2}
%     {}
%     {\expandafter\etb@listitem@i
%      \expandafter{@secondoftwo#2}{#1}}}
% \long\def\etb@listitem@i#1#2{#2{#1}}
% \makeatother
\usepackage{biblatex}


\begin{document}


Hello world!


\end{document}
raedma
  • 1,794
  • works ok for me, show the complete log-file. – Ulrike Fischer Feb 05 '21 at 22:01
  • Your MWE compiles fine for me without any error. As Ulrike says, we need to see the full .log file (it might be too long to be included here, so you can upload it to a text-sharing website such as https://pastebin.com/ or https://gist.github.com/). – moewe Feb 06 '21 at 05:49
  • All I can say for now is that line 202 in biblatex.sty should not be blx@packageincompatibility, it should be \blx@packageincompatibility. Your error message is consistent with your biblatex.sty missing the \ and having only blx@packageincompatibility. – moewe Feb 06 '21 at 05:51
  • Weird. I had a look at https://github.com/plk/biblatex/blob/dev/tex/latex/biblatex/biblatex.sty. Seems the beginning \ was missing in the version of biblatex I updated to. Well, adding it fixed the problem. Thanks. Could one of you please add an answer in order to mark the question answered? – raedma Feb 06 '21 at 09:05

1 Answers1

1

The error you are getting is consistent with line 202 of your biblatex.sty being just

blx@packageincompatibility

instead of the correct

\blx@packageincompatibility

I don't know why your biblatex.sty is missing the \, all I can say is that according to git blame the line has been unchanged in biblatex.sty since it was added more than two years ago in version 3.12. (In particular there never was any release version of biblatex that was missing the \.)

I would recommend uninstalling biblatex and re-installing it to make sure that your files are OK and that there are no other biblatex files that are corrupted. (Since you are using MikTeX this can be done easily via the MikTeX Console.)

moewe
  • 175,683