Hi,

I have been struggling the past several days to use biblatex + biber on a bib
file that combines english and greek citations. My platform is Linux (Linux 
from scratch to be exact) with TeXLive 2009 (latest updates included) and the
latest stable biber. I also use UTF8 (LANG=el_GR.UTF-8).

I have three minimum example files available from 
http://elap.teipat.gr/bob.tar.bz2


- mret.bib is the bib file
- old.tex is a driver file based on traditional bibtex or bibtex8 and works fine

  (Workflow is: latex old, bibtex(8) old, latex old, latex old and the result is
  fine. I don't seem to need any mapping file switches as the multilanguage bib
  documentation advises.)

- new.tex is a driver file for biblatex + biber

  (Workflow is latex new, biber new, latex new)

If I only use the english citations and english language the biblatex/biber
combo works fine. If I switch to greek language and english citations, it sort
of works, with all latin characters somehow translated to greek characters. If I
use babel with both english and greek laguages (the way it works with old.tex)
then I get lots of messages like the following from biber:

"\x{fffd}" does not map to ascii at
/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.10.1/Biber/Output/BBL.pm line 375

and lots of messages re "Undefined control sequence" from latex. The dvi file
has garbage characters for the greek citation and all latin characters
translated to greek characters for the other citations.

I must be doing something wrong since biber is supposed to handle utf8 encoding
and as I pointed out I get good results with the traditional way. It just sort
of bothers me that I can't get it to work with biber (I've already spent too
much time on this, trying out various options/switches from the biblatex 
manual).

I would be grateful if someone can point me in the right direction.

TIA

Tasos

On 2010-05-26, A. Drosos wrote:
> I have been struggling the past several days to use biblatex + biber on
> a bib file that combines english and greek citations.

....

> - new.tex is a driver file for biblatex + biber

>   (Workflow is latex new, biber new, latex new)

> If I only use the english citations and english language the
> biblatex/biber combo works fine. 

> If I switch to greek language and english citations, it sort of works,
> with all latin characters somehow translated to greek characters. 

This is normal for all text in "greek" or "polutonikogreek" language (
the font encoding LGR).

It seems babelbib recognizes the language tag in the bib file but biber
does not.

What happens if you insert \selectlanguage{english} before the
bibliography?

> If I use babel with both english and greek laguages (the way it works
> with old.tex) then I get lots of messages like the following from
> biber:

> "\x{fffd}" does not map to ascii at
> /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.10.1/Biber/Output/BBL.pm line 375

I don't know where the FFFD	REPLACEMENT CHARACTER
comes from. Maybe the UTF-8 support in biber does not include Greek
characters?

Günter

On 2010-05-27, Guenter Milde <milde@users.berlios.de> wrote:
> On 2010-05-26, A. Drosos wrote:
>> I have been struggling the past several days to use biblatex + biber on
>> a bib file that combines english and greek citations.
>
> ...
>
>> - new.tex is a driver file for biblatex + biber
>
>>   (Workflow is latex new, biber new, latex new)
>
>> If I only use the english citations and english language the
>> biblatex/biber combo works fine. 
>
>> If I switch to greek language and english citations, it sort of works,
>> with all latin characters somehow translated to greek characters. 
>
> This is normal for all text in "greek" or "polutonikogreek" language (
> the font encoding LGR).
>
> It seems babelbib recognizes the language tag in the bib file but biber
> does not.
>
> What happens if you insert \selectlanguage{english} before the
> bibliography?


The latin characters come out fine, the greek characters come out as 
fffd's


>
>> If I use babel with both english and greek laguages (the way it works
>> with old.tex) then I get lots of messages like the following from
>> biber:
>
>> "\x{fffd}" does not map to ascii at
>> /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.10.1/Biber/Output/BBL.pm line 375
>
> I don't know where the FFFD	REPLACEMENT CHARACTER
> comes from. Maybe the UTF-8 support in biber does not include Greek
> characters?
>

Could be. Is there a way to test this?

> Günter

A. Drosos wrote:

> I would be grateful if someone can point me in the right direction.

Try using XeLaTeX.

Biber is not the problem here. You have Unicode input but the output
is still 8-bit. In order to format Unicode input using 8-bit fonts,
the input characters have to be mapped to several fonts which cover
256 characters each. This remapping is currently not supported by
biblatex (and probably never will).

PS: Use Biber's -u and -U switches or set the bibencoding option of
biblatex:

\usepackage[bibencoding=utf8]{biblatex}

Setting babel=other may also be useful.

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