Chicago-style punctuation in references with tex4ht and biblatex-chicago

Question

The package biblatex-chicago moves trailing punctuation inside closing quotation marks in bibliographic notes.

But when using tex4ht to convert to ODT format, the punctuation remains outside the quotation marks.

How do I preserve Chicago-style punctuation when converting to ODT?

Compile this (file.tex) with latex file && biber file && mk4ht oolatex file:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@article{screed,
  title={Unhappy Endings: Why Punctuation Should Be Inside Quotation Marks},
  shorttitle={Unhappy Endings},
  author={Manual, Chicago},
  journaltitle={Fussy Punctuators},
  volume=29,
  number=3,
  pages={131--132}
}
\end{filecontents}

\usepackage[american]{babel} 
\usepackage[notes,backend=biber]{biblatex-chicago}
\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

\begin{document}

Cite this article.\autocite{screed}

\end{document}

Answer 1

It seems that there is some interference between tex4ht, Babel and BibLaTeX which cause that punctuation rules for US English aren't applied. The following configuration file, biblatex-chicago.4ht will load the rules explicitly:

\blx@defbibextras{english}{\uspunctuation}
\endinput

I would also use the make4ht ODT output instead of mk4ht oolatex. It fixes some issues regarding the document validation and it enables to call Biber directly during the compilation. Save the following file as mybuild.mk4:

Make:add("biber", "biber ${input}")

if mode=="draft" then
  Make:htlatex{}
else
  Make:htlatex{}
  Make:biber {}
  Make:htlatex {}
  Make:htlatex {}
end

Compile using

make4ht -f odt -e mybuild.mk4 filename.tex

The subsequent compilations can be speed up using the draft mode:

make4ht -f odt -e mybuild.mk4 -m draft filename.tex

This is the result: