[OS X TeX] Biber

[Joseph Wright]

On 20/10/2020 15:55, Joseph Wright wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I'm having an issue with Biber on the Mac when using TeXworks: I'm not 
> sure exactly where the issue lies, hence including the various mailing 
> lists here.
> 
> Those of you on the MacTeX list will know I've been trying to do some 
> apparently simple: access a single BibTeX file stored inside my 
> 'Documents' area. It seems this is tricky on the Mac using BIBINPUTS, so 
> I have gone down the symlink route: I have in ~/Library/texmf/bibtex/bib
> 
>      ln - s <path-to-directory-holding-my-database> Literature
> 
>  From the Terminal, everything is happy:
> 
>      joseph at palladium ~ % kpsewhich --biber Literature.bib
>      /Users/joseph/Library/texmf/bibtex/bib/Literature.bib
> 
> and I can set up a test, run pdflatex/Biber/pdflatex and get nice 
> references typeset. Things get weird, though, from inside TeXworks.
> 
>  From TeXworks, I *can* use classical BibTeX to find the file (using a 
> suitable 'classical' input file). I can also find other files linked 
> using symlinks, most notably some local classes. However, Biber can't 
> find Literature.bib when run from inside TeXworks.
> 
> As I'm not relying on the environment, but only on the file system, I'm 
> at a loss. Details of my TeXworks installation are below - it's a very 
> recent install.
> 
> Anyone got any idea what's up? (Obviously I can just run Biber from the 
> Terminal.) A quick test shows everything is OK from TeXShop too ...
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Joseph
> 
> 
> ----- configuration info -----
> TeXworks version : 0.6.5r.649699a ("travis-ci")
> Install location : /Applications/TeXworks.app
> Library path     : /Users/joseph/Library/TeXworks/
> pdfTeX location  : /usr/local/texlive/2020/bin/x86_64-darwin/pdftex
> Operating system : Mac OS X 10.15.7 (Darwin Kernel Version 19.6.0: Mon 
> Aug 31 22:12:52 PDT 2020; root:xnu-6153.141.2~1/RELEASE_X86_64)
> Qt version       : 5.14.1 (build) / 5.14.1 (runtime)
> ------------------------------

Ulrike Fischer asked a good question: can Biber find other .bib files: 
it seems only if they are either 'here' or are given as absolute paths. 
That's not affected by the symlink aspect, so presumably there's 
something preventing tree searching.

Joseph