Language mapping changes in biblatex 3.11 break stuff

[dcpurton]

biblatex 3.11 has changed the way language mapping is done which breaks quite a lot of things.

It might be necessary to always use babel once I've fixed things up.

[Nhapsie]

Thanks for the attention, much appreciated.

[dcpurton]

@Nhapsie , I should have tested sooner when 3.11 came out. There's a few issues. I suggest holding off upgrading biblatex if you can until I can get things fixed.

[Nhapsie]

@dcpurton, don't worry, take your time.

[dcpurton]

Bad news :(. This might require a move away from polyglossia to babel. This is doable if your Hebrew requirements are not too complicated (which is hopefully the case, for documents where the main language is LTR).

See https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/432347/87678

[Nhapsie]

Ok, I can wait for a fix, no problem. I'm using stable versions of BibLaTeX and Biber anyway (and MacTeX 2017) and it's working well.

[dcpurton]

Fixed in v0.9.

But note that polyglossia is no longer supported out of the box. (You could still make it work with some tweaks your document). Use babel if at all possible. The documentation and sbl-paper.tex shows how to set things up for Greek and Hebrew under babel.

[dcpurton]

If you want to continue using polyglossia, you have to add some extra things to your preamble. See https://github.com/dcpurton/biblatex-sbl/wiki/FAQ

[Nhapsie]

I switched to MacTeX 2018 yesterday, and using latest BibLaTeX 3.11 and Biber 2.11. Preliminary testing of sbl master compiled Hebrew just right, without following instruction of sbl-paper.tex. But just to be on the safe side I plan to implement babel on my cls file.

[dcpurton]

There will be some problems. Is punctuation inside quote marks for articles? Are dates in the format DD MMM YYYY? (Check the Niditch conference paper)

[dcpurton]

The issue is not with Hebrew per se, but with polyglossia.

[Nhapsie]

Punctuation is within quote marks for articles. The Niditch conference paper came out good so far (DD MONTH YYYY). Any other errors you remember? I will be checking for problems today.

[dcpurton]

Hmmm. I'm not sure how you are getting that.

Here's what I get with latest git version and biblatex 3.11:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{polyglossia}
\setmainlanguage[variant=american]{english}
\usepackage[style=sbl]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{biblatex-sbl.bib}

\begin{document}
\null\vfill
Filler text \autocite{leyerle:1993}.

Filler text \autocite{niditch:1994}.

\printbiblist{abbreviations}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

[Nhapsie]

I see the problem in (1) Leyerle and (2) Niditch above. Upon double checking, I'm sorry to inform that I have never loaded the polyglossia package in my cls (although I have it installed). I had thought it was loaded by default somewhere.

[dcpurton]

In that case, no need to worry! You don't have to use babel either. You can continue to do what you are doing now.

[Nhapsie]

Correct, thanks.