[OS X TeX] biber on PPC

[Philip Kime]

As previously noted, there is no PPC binary for biber - the "universal" binary is i386 which will run on leopard or snow leopard intel only. It is highly unlikely that there will be a PPC binary as I just don't have the resources to do this. However, in case you didn't know, biber is a perl program and the "binary" is essentially a specially packed executable using the marvellous perl PAR::Packer module which packs a perl program plus the entire perl install tree and libraries needed into an executable (hence the large "binary" size) and then unpacks this on first run to a temp location. After this initial unpacking (which explains the longer run time the first time you run a new biber version), the binary simply acts as a redirector into this unpacked tree. As far as the user is concerned, it's a stand-alone binary. So, since biber is a perl program, you can, if you are ok with installing perl modules, get the biber source tree from git or via the .tar.gz on SourceForge and install it as a normal perl program. This will work on any platform that has perl (5.10 or greater, recommended 5.12+).

PK
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Dr Philip Kime