2 minutes
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.te
x 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},