[OS X TeX] Improved support for biber in TeXShop

[Alan Munn]

I don't think this is really the place to have a discussion about preferred workflows. I only meant that there are probably others like me who prefer not to use one of the latexmk engines routinely; I'm sure there are some who prefer to use them exclusively. Indepdendently of this, however, I think there are adavantages to having a dedicated single tool route to run biber on a document, in addition to the latexmk option if only for the sake of transparency of how the system works. Almost all documentation relating to using bibliographies in LaTeX will be of the the form 'run latex bibtex/biber latex latex' etc; for TeXShop users, implementing this sequence at the momen is non-trivial on a per-document basis. I agree that "Use latexmk" is *an* answer, I just don't think it should be *the* answer.

 Alan


----- Original Message -----
From: Herbert Schulz
Sent: 07/14/12 02:39 PM
To: TeX on Mac OS X Mailing List
Subject: Re: [OS X TeX] Improved support for biber in TeXShop

 On Jul 14, 2012, at 2:26 PM, Alan Munn wrote: > On Jul 14, 2012, at 1:54 PM, Alan Munn wrote: > Now that TL 2012 is out (thanks Dick and all of the TeXLive folk), I thought I'd bring up an issue with TeXShop. > > Many of us are increasingly switching to biblatex for our bibliographies, and biblatex runs best with biber as the backend instead of bibtex. As it stands now, TeXShop has no simple way to switch between these backends on a per-document basis. This would be the most desirable behaviour since anyone using biblatex is likely to also have older documents that require bibtex, not to mention that sometimes a bibtex solution is necessary. > > In this Stackexchange question, http://tex.stackexchange.com/q/38348/2693 Mark Everitt provided a script that implements this idea quite nicely. > > The script source is here: https://github.com/qubyte/BibDirective > > I've been using this script myself, but it would be nice if something like it were actually incorporated into TeXShop directly. > On Jul 14, 2012, at 2:10 PM, Herb S > chulz wrote: The latexmk engines will automatically switch to biber from bibtex if they (actually the latexmk program that all the engines depend upon) detect that it's being used. Thanks, Herb, I'm aware of that but I certainly don't want to run latexmk all the time, (and I suspect others don't either) so this isn't really an ideal solution. Most of the time I want to minimize compilation time, and will only run biber/bibtex occasionally when working on a document. The advantage of a per-file directive is that I never need to change the engine. Alan Howdy, I wouldn't generalize to that others don't want to either; I know lots of folks that use pdflatexmk as their default engine. I tend to only use the latexmk engines essentially exclusively now. If a biber (or bibtex) run is not necessary the engines won't run biber/bibtex. I just took one of my files that tests biber with a bunch of bibliographic references. Ran it and biber ran. Then I just changed some text so that the bibliography didn't change and when I ran it there was a single run of pdflatex. Good Luck, Herb Schulz (herbs at wideopenwest dot com)
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