[Tex/LaTex] biblatex .blg file not created on Windows

biberbiblatexbibtexmiktextexstudio

The following MWE does not compile a proper bibliography using biblatex with either biber or bibtex backends in TeXstudio (version info below) – but only on Windows 10; none of the following give any errors on my Ubuntu boot:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[backend=bibtex]{biblatex} % also tried backend=biber
\bibliography{tmp}
\begin{filecontents}{tmp.bib}
  @Article{Ashburner2005,
    author   = {Ashburner, John and Friston, Karl J},
    title    = {{Unified segmentation.}},
    journal  = {NeuroImage},
    year     = {2005}
  }
\end{filecontents}
\begin{document}
  \cite{Ashburner2005}
  \printbibliography
\end{document}

The error messages I receive are

bibtex:

Process started: bibtex.exe "tmp"
I couldn't open file name `tmp.blg'
Process exited normally

biber:

Can't open tmp.blg (Permission denied) at C:\Users\Jesse\AppData\Local\Temp\par-4a65737365\cache-02947398048c143181ebb9c4e483433d2665ac35\inc\lib/Log/Log4perl/Appender/File.pm line 151.

and in both cases the PDF is the unformatted [Ashburner2005], nothing else.

Every time I compile, I clean all files except the .tex files from this directory. I've tried compiling from the command line and via TeXstudio.

Some other possibly useful info from the .log file

...
file 'biblatex-dm.cfg' not found.
...
Package biblatex Info: ... file 'tmp.bbl' not found.
...

This seems to be a recent issue. I haven't used Windows in a while … I'm completely stumped. I suspect it is from a MikTeX update? Questions:

Why is this behavior different with OS?
Can you compile my MWE without issue?
What is the problem / how can I fix it?

Seems to be related to this one.

Versions:

TeXstudio 2.12.6 (hg 6632:7777b2b8a906) Using Qt Version 5.9.1, compiled with Qt 5.9.1 R

MiKTeX-pdfTeX 2.9.6499 (1.40.18) (MiKTeX 2.9.6500 64-bit)

Best Answer

Turns out Bitdefender was silently blocking biber.exe and bibtex.exe. What an obnoxious "feature".

Sorry for wasting everybody's time.

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[Tex/LaTex] BibTeX works, but not biblatex

The following MWE (including your bib file, a few minor changes to yours) should run on your system without errors and only one correct warning: overwriting file \jobname.bib (that tells you that file \jobname.bib has been rewritten. \jobname is changend to the name of your texfile. for example test. You have to run: pdflatex test.tex, bibtex test, pdflatex test.tex, pdflatex test.tex).

%http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/83128/bibtex-works-but-not-biblatex
\RequirePackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents*}{\jobname.bib}
@BOOK{KandR,
  AUTHOR    = {Kernighan, Brian W. and Ritchie, Dennis M.},
  TITLE     = {{The C Programming Language Second Edition}},
  PUBLISHER = {Prentice-Hall, Inc.},
  YEAR      = {1988},
}
\end{filecontents*}

\documentclass{article} 
\usepackage[%
  backend=bibtex   % use BibTeX
% backend=biber    % Use biber
]{biblatex} 
\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}
\begin{document} 
Hello \cite{KandR}. How are you?
\printbibliography 
\end{document}

[Tex/LaTex] Problem running Biblatex with bib file exported from Zotero

I solved my issues of compatibility between the BibTex file exported from Zotero and BibLatex. I recap the solution here. Apparently BibLatex is much more sensible than BibTex when it comes to reading a BibTex file...

To export correctly the bibliography from Zotero and then into a Tex document via BibLatex I used this BibTeX Export Translator (modified by Robin Wilson) with two important tweaks:

1) On line 11 of the translator script you need to set "exportNotes": true, to "exportNotes": false, (of course just in case you have added notes to your Zotero items, e.g. you extract annotations from PDFs). This will avoid BibLatex crashing on too long fields.

2) On line 2256 you need to tell the translator to avoid adding a comma after each bibliography item (the comma will result in BibLatex giving a warning on the first line of each entry excluding the first...) changing this line: Zotero.write((first ? "" : ",\n\n") + "@"+type+"{"+citekey); with this line: Zotero.write((first ? "" : "\n\n") + "@"+type+"{"+citekey);

Another possible source of problems of the BibTeX Export Translator could be the character encoding. In my translator I kept as in source file "exportCharset": "ISO-8859-1", on line 10. I tried to change it to UTF-8 but it created another class of issues, not with BibLatex (it run without errors) but with Latex,

[1{/usr/local/texlive/2013/texmf-var/fonts/map/pdftex/updmap/pdftex.map}]
(./bib/price2012.tex [2]
! Undefined control sequence.
<to be read again> \edef \blx@tempa {193\x 
                                           {FFFD}\x {FFFD}\x {FFFD}219}
l.8 \printbibliography[heading=subbibliography]

for each refsection. It also messed with the "pages" field of some items, outputting:

Andrea B. Hollingshead. “Information suppression and status persistence in group decision making the effects of communication media”. In: Human Communication Research 23.2 (1996), 193fffdfffdfffd219.

I then switched back to "exportCharset": "ISO-8859-1", and both BibLatex and Latex run without warnings or errors. The PDF output was correct:

Andrea B. Hollingshead. “Information suppression and status persistence in group decision making the effects of communication media”. In: Human Communication Research 23.2 (1996), 193–219.

and I also get correct output with the umlaut of Habermas:

Habermas reference

EDIT: The problem with the page field was probably due by a odd "-" character that you sometimes get to separate the 2 page numbers when you download the citation from the Internet.

Best Answer

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[Tex/LaTex] BibTeX works, but not biblatex

[Tex/LaTex] Problem running Biblatex with bib file exported from Zotero

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