From time to time, I need to typeset Welsh. Sometimes, I need to typeset citations and bibliographies in Welsh. I think that last time I did this, I may still have been using BibTeX although I am honestly not sure. In any case, my entire work-flow now uses biber
and biblatex
...
I found lockstep's excellent answer on changing the names of things, including the names of things used by biblatex
. However, that cannot deal with the case of an unsupported language.
Suppose that I want to typeset a document in Welsh:
\documentclass[a4paper,welsh]{article}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}% welsh needs utf8x but biblatex doesn't like it
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}% not great for Welsh but the best pdfTeX can do
\usepackage{csquotes}% doesn't like Welsh though biblatex likes csquotes on account of babel...
\usepackage[backend=biber]{biblatex}
\bibliography{biblatex-examples}
\title{Fy Nogfen}
\author{Rhywun}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\tableofcontents
\section{Cyntaf}
\autocite{westfahl:space}
\printbibliography
\end{document}
There are multiple problems in such a case. (One is that I need utf8x
but can't use it on account of biblatex
. Another is that I need utf8x
at all. Another is that biblatex
likes csquotes
but csquotes
doesn't do Welsh. But these are irrelevant to this question.)
The output is as follows:
Note that the use of the English citation is just so this is easy to reproduce. Obviously, the content of the reference might well be in Welsh. (Though it might be in English, too.)
As can be seen, while elements of the document controlled by babel
are handled correctly, those under the control of biblatex
are not. However, I cannot simply modify the solution offered by lockstep for changing strings to customised English variants. That is, I can't just use a Welsh version of
\DefineBibliographyStrings{english}{%
bibliography = {Works Cited},
references = {Works Cited},
}
because biblatex
has never heard of it.
What is the most appropriate way to configure biblatex
for use with an unsupported language?
utf8x
is just an aside: It seems to be regarded as the best option to use\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
instead. For the problems withcsquotes
,\DeclareQuoteStyle
is needed (see quotation mark (quotation sign) xelatex + polyglossia + csquotes, for example), having read Wikipedia on the subject though, I'd just go with\DeclareQuoteAlias[british]{english}{welsh}
. – moewe Sep 15 '14 at 15:21utf8x
and if I end up having to define the lot usingutf8
to get a document to compile then I will but I'm too lazy to do so until I have to ;) since it basically means adding support for all relevant accents on two more vowels in two cases. However, if I could solve thebiblatex
problem, then it would definitely be worth doing that properly since that would allow me to avoid theutf8x
/biblatex
conflict. That is, thebiblatex
issue is the really the one I'm concerned with and not sure how to tackle. – cfr Sep 15 '14 at 16:05biblatex
question. – moewe Sep 15 '14 at 16:13utf8x
for the extra accented vowels (e.g.,\^w
) -- which is in row 3 in my (ancient) copy of iso/iec 10646-1. is this not the case -- i.e., does theutf8
encoding definition cope with such letters? – wasteofspace Sep 19 '14 at 11:05utf8
does not support circumflexes on either 'w' or 'y'. However,utf8x
cannot be used withbiblatex
as far as I can tell. There are ways around this, though, since you can tellutf8
about the additional characters. – cfr Sep 19 '14 at 20:56