[Tex/LaTex] Bibliographies when using subfiles

biblatexbibliographiesconditionalssubfiles

I am writing my Ph.D. thesis in XeLaTeX with Biblatex, and there are times when I need to compile individual chapters, and times when I need to compile the entire document, so I use subfiles, which works wonderfully. However, in each of these chapters I have a \printbibliography command, which I would like to turn off when compiling the final document, so that only the \printbibliography command is run in the mainfile.

The file structure is something like:

Main.tex:

\usepackage{subfiles, biblatex}
\begin{document}

\subfile{Chapter1.tex}

\printbibliography
\end{document}

Chapter1.tex:

\documentclass[Main.tex]{subfiles}
\begin{document}
\cite{Someguy1981}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

Best Answer

From subfiles.sty the \subfile command is defined as:

\newcommand\subfile[1]{\begingroup\skip@preamble\input{#1}\endgroup}

So it is straightforward to hook in some code to locally redefine \printbibliography to do nothing. For an example add the following to the preamble of the main file:

\makeatletter

\newrobustcmd*{\nobibliography}{%
  \@ifnextchar[%]
    {\blx@nobibliography}
    {\blx@nobibliography[]}}

\def\blx@nobibliography[#1]{}

\appto{\skip@preamble}{\let\printbibliography\nobibliography}

\makeatother

Note that biblatex makes bibliographic data available via citation commands. So unless you want to view the bibliography entries outside the main file, the subfiles need not invoke \printbibliography.

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