RogBlog

I recently found a subtle bug in biber 2.1 that drove me crazy.  It seems that biber 2.1 silently fails for certain Latex macros that it should convert into UTF-8.  In particular the “\l” macro (Polish ł) is one; I’m still finding more.  Here’s a minimal working (well, failing) example:

\documentclass[12pt]{article}

\usepackage[american]{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}
\usepackage[backend=biber,style=apa,doi=false,url=false,hyperref=true,apamaxprtauth=100]{biblatex}
\DeclareLanguageMapping{american}{american-apa}
\usepackage{filecontents}
\usepackage{hyperref}

\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@article{sobkowiak:1993,
Author = {Sobkowiak, W\l odzimierz},
Journal = {Language and Speech},
Number = {4},
Pages = {393--414},
Publisher = {SAGE Publications},
Title = {Unmarked-before-marked as a Freezing Principle},
Volume = {36},
Year = {1993}}

@inproceedings{zuidema:2006CoNLL,
Author = {Zuidema, Willem},
Booktitle = {Proceedings of {CoNLL}},
Organization = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
Pages = {29--36},
Title = {What are the productive units of natural language grammar? {A} {DOP} approach to the automatic identification of constructions},
Year = {2006}}
\end{filecontents}
\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

\begin{document}

\nocite{zuidema:2006CoNLL}

\printbibliography
\end{document}

Calling pdflatex and then biber on this document (called test-biblatex.tex) gives the following result:

INFO - This is Biber 2.1
INFO - Logfile is 'test-biblatex.blg'
INFO - Reading 'test-biblatex.bcf'
INFO - Found 1 citekeys in bib section 0
INFO - Processing section 0
INFO - Looking for bibtex format file 'test-biblatex.bib' for section 0
INFO - Decoding LaTeX character macros into UTF-8

…and that’s it!  No error message.  But it produces no .bbl file and thus subsequent compilation with pdflatex yields no references!

Update: the development version of biber (2.2) doesn’t have this problem.  You can find it on Sourceforge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/biblatex-biber/files/biblatex-biber/development/).  Thank you Philip Kime for helping me with this!