Gibberish in the front matter when using biblatex

[jongwook]

I'm using Tectonic and Travis CI to automatically build PDF files and upload it to Github Pages (project link).

Unlike the output in the local editor, Tectonic's output contains gibberish words filling 5 pages before the cover page:

It's hard to isolate the source of problem as it's a large project, but the broken words are coming from the bibtex records.

I'm using biblatex with bibtex backend, at the moment.

[jongwook]

I confirm that the problem goes away if I don't use biblatex and use the old-style \bibliography.

[pkgw]

That is not surprising in a sense. Tectonic only knows about bibtex right now, and it is confirmed to have problems with documents that use biblatex. We still don't have a strategy for how to deal with biblatex but the engine should at least produce an error for documents that it can't handle. If you have the chance to create a minimal example that demonstrates the problem, that would be very helpful. Or if you're comfortable sharing the document source with me, I can try to develop a minimal example myself.

[jongwook]

@pkgw I've made a minimal example that reproduces this error: here

The same package has another tag long_url_error where bibtex fails to process a citation with url field longer than about 70 characters. That happens when the url is long enough to make two \verb commands in the .bbl file, and according to this SO question it should have been fixed in the latest biblatex.

[Neved4]

Hey @jongwook I'm happy to bring the news that your MWE is giving proper output! You can use any of bibtex or biber biblatex backends under tectonic 0.11.0 as of now 🎉

Would you give it a try and let me know if it works for you? Thx 💜

[jongwook]

@mnrvwl Indeed it works! It's long been since I completed the dissertation in question, but it's a wonder of open source. Thank you so much for the news!

[pkgw]

Thanks for the followup @mnrvwl and confirmation @jongwook!