I am trying to compile a document using BibLaTeX and Biber that references a document by a Latvian author whose surname contains an a with a macron diacritical mark (ā).
Without the --output-safechars
flag for Biber, pdflatex
cannot process the .bbl
file and says:
Package inputenc Error: Unicode char \u8:-ü not set up for use with LaTeX.
This seems to refer to the aforementioned special character ā, even though I took care to use the appropriate LaTeX escape sequence {\=a}
in my .bib
file.
MWE:
File test.tex
:
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[
backend=biber,
style=alphabetic
]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{test.bib}
\begin{document}
abc~\cite{SIOC}
\printbibliography
\end{document}
File test.bib
:
@MISC{SIOC,
author = {Uldis Boj\={a}rs and John Breslin},
title = {{SIOC} Core Ontology Specification},
howpublished = {\url{http://rdfs.org/sioc/spec/}},
year = {2010},
timestamp = {2015.07.06}
}
Steps to reproduce the error:
pdflatex test.tex
biber test
pdflatex test.tex
Steps to work around the error and get the desired PDF file:
pdflatex test.tex
biber --output-safechars test
pdflatex test.tex
biber --output-safechars test
pdflatex test.tex
pdflatex test.tex
Interestingly, with --output-safechars
, the author name is rendered in the .bbl
file as follows:
{{hash=4364fe18faaa147d121961f15b77b40a}{Boj\={a}rs}{B\bibinitperiod}{Uldis}{U\bibinitperiod}{}{}{}{}}%
Without --output-safechars
, it is rendered like this:
{{hash=4364fe18faaa147d121961f15b77b40a}{Bojārs}{B\bibinitperiod}{Uldis}{U\bibinitperiod}{}{}{}{}}%
That means, Biber actively changes my escape sequence (that would have worked in pdflatex
) back to a Unicode character (that does not work).
Is this the expected behaviour?
More concretely:
Is it safe in terms of side-effects to use --output-safechars
instead, and if so, is there any reason why one would ever call Biber without --output-safechars
?
Alternatively, it seems to be possible to define the respective Unicode characters, or allegedly to use a --bblsafechars
option, even though that does not appear in the Biber manual.