I had occasion to look over some old dissertation-related files from twenty-years ago to this month… The directory was an odd mix of half-baked $\LaTeX$ and $\textsc{Bib}\TeX $, readable but clearly incomplete *.RTF, *.DOC, and, of course *.SAM. *.SAM files were created by Ami Pro word processor from Lotus that I had running under windows 3.1 on my almost state-of-the-art Dell i486DX2-S. The *.SAM files were what were printed for submission, the $\LaTeX$ stuff was just for giggles, but I did maintain my bibliographies in $\textsc{Bib}\TeX $ format.

More on those *.SAM files in another post, when I have time to look at the content of this ancient work; for now some bib. stuff.

New essay3.tex file has in the preamble:

\usepackage[backend=biber,style=apa,citestyle=authoryear]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{essay3.bib} %no .bib extension if backend=bibtex

and the last six lines of essay3.tex read:

\nocite{*}
\printbibliography
\begin{center}
Typeset in \href{http://www.latex-project.org/}{\LaTeX}
\end{center}
\end{document}

So, there are no great shakes to get this file to start using biber under $\textsc{Bib}\LaTeX $. And biber is the way to go forward… Unicode support, ease of style editing, and so forth. (The student of things archival will wonder if I am now messing with the record here. Err, sure, but then I was doing that as soon as the files were moved from those 3.5" floppies. And, anyway, is not every representation different?)

BUT… essay3.tex would not compile! Now I expected not to be able to read the olde Ami Pro files after twenty years, but I expected more from these arcane plain text files. I bashed (pun intended) around for a couple of hours, tearing hair, wondering if anyone really understands $*\TeX$ anyway, went for a bike ride, and thought about the last twenty years. What had changed? Blair, obviously. Married to a decent, smart, sometimes funny woman. Two lovely boys. Unicode! Unicode happened. Nope. All files UTF-8.

I start going over the *.bib file (which validates using all the usual tools) entry by entry until:

@pamphlet{lstm_1920,
	Author = {---},
	Location = {Liverpool},
	Title = {Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine: Historic Record, 1898-1920},
	Year = {1920}}

Here I have an “–”, an m-dash (three hyphens), and I suddenly recall that biber is written in Perl. In PCREs the hyphen “-” is a non-letter character, and in the bowels of biber somewhere there is prolly a regexp checking the contents of the “author” field. Quickfix?

Author = {\textemdash},

🎲🎲 Dice!

So there you go…. looking stupid so you don’t have to!