Editing the bibliography without changing citations in the text

Question

Preparing my manuscript for publication, I need to manually redact the bibliography I generated with biblatex (style authortitle-dw) and Biber. This is mostly about fixing the line and page breaks (some nasty URLs, making sure that bib items do not break across pages, etc., see pictures below). I cannot make these fixes in the *.bbl file since the changes there would also affect the citations in the text. Any ideas how to do that?

Bad URL (too long)

Bad line (to long)

Bad page break

Answer 1

To make sure that bibliography items do not break across pages, change the definition of \bibsetup so that \interlinepenalty is set to 10000 instead of 5000.

\patchcmd{\bibsetup}{\interlinepenalty=5000}{\interlinepenalty=10000}{}{}

Here's the original definition from biblatex.def:

\newcommand*{\bibsetup}{%
  \interlinepenalty=5000\relax
  \widowpenalty=10000\relax
  \clubpenalty=10000\relax
  \raggedbottom
  \frenchspacing
  \biburlsetup}

Answer 2

I have found that if you want a typographically flawless bibliography there often is no other way than to typeset it by hand. Even the best algorithms for line and page breaking cannot neatly resolve every issue for you. That's why TeX is so kind as to tell us about underfull and overfull boxes. Overfull boxes occur in practically every text and it is the same with bibliographies--only much, much worse because there are so many names in there (always difficult to hyphenate correctly), so many strings in bib items that shouldn't be broken across lines (page numbers, labels, ...) and so many bib items that shouldn't be broken across pages (at least not from an odd to an even page).

For my real-life project I have now taken the approach mentioned in one of my comments: To generate the main text containing the citations and references I use biblatex and Biber as usual. For the bibliography, though, I make a copy of the *.bbl file, rename it and use it with a separate *.tex document to compile a separate PDF that consists only of the bibliography. Now I can make all the necessary modifications to the renamed *.bbl file without affecting the main text. At the end, I delete the (flawed) bibliography from the first PDF and insert the fixed one from the second PDF. Another--possibly easier--way would be to compile the bibliography first, copy and paste it from the resulting PDF directly into the *.tex source, remove the \printbibliography command and tidy up the pasted bibliography text by hand.

This is all very cumbersome and time-consuming but who said making fine books was easy?

To show you the difference between the automatically generated bibliography and the manually optimized one, I have uploaded two PDFs here and here. As you can see, manually editing the *.bbl file not only allowed me to optimize line and page breaks but also to do some nice things like dictionary stye headers and emphasized beginnings of new alphabetical letters. Note that there are probably still some minor faults I have to fix...

Answer 3

I have used

\sloppy
\printbibliography[heading=bibintoc]
\fussy

before to deal with bad line breaks in the bibliography. That sometimes gives very wide spaces between words, but it was good enough for me. YMMV.

Answer 4

I can't see if this will work without your bibliography and code, but setting the following counters to a number greater than 0 (but less than 10,000) should allow URLs to break across lines.

\setcounter{biburlnumpenalty}{9000}
\setcounter{biburlucpenalty}{9000}
\setcounter{biburllcpenalty}{9000}

The higher the numbers, the less allowed line breaks will be. There are similar counters with similar properties for things other than URLs. See Section 4.10.3 of the biblatex manual.