[Tex/LaTex] Misplaced alignment tab character &. \printbibliography[heading=bibintoc,title={References}

alignmentsymbols

Misplaced alignment tab character &. \printbibliography[heading=bibintoc,title={References}

%\printbibliography[heading=bibintoc]
\printbibliography[heading=bibintoc,title={References}]
\label{bib:mybiblio}
\appendix
\input{sections/appAname.tex}
\end{document}

line 29: Misplaced alignment tab character &. ...raphy[heading=bibintoc,title={References}]

i am getting this error and i can not find a entry in my bib file with a "&" that i havent allredy changed to "\&". can enyone help me?

Best Answer

Answer 2 was very helpful, the problem was that a had used a & instead of the word and in an author's name, I found it and correct it but it was until I erased the .bbl and .blg (both in my reference files and my main file, make a backup first) files then I have compiled with BibTeX then compile with pdflatex that the problem was corrected.

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[Tex/LaTex] Error with percent sign in bib entry field when using biblatex/biber

As of biber 0.9.4/biblatex 1.6 you can define user-specified field and entrytype mappings. A special case of this is that you can map fields to null which essentially removes them from the input stream completely. So if for example, you want to just ignore all ABSTRACT fields in bibtex data sources (which are often the source of unwanted special chars when exported from automated systems), you can put this in your biber.conf:

<map>
  <bibtex>
   <globalfield>
     ABSTRACT BMAP_NULL
   </globalfield>
  </bibtex>
</map>

The nice thing about this is that you don't have to change the data source itself which is good if it's auto-generated and you don't have control over it. You can also ignore/map fields only in certain entrytypes. See the 0.9.4 biber manual, section 2.1.1.

EDIT: The config file format will change in Biber 0.9.8 because the current format is too restrictive. Mapping will be less confusing. Here is the same solution in the new format:

<config>
  <sourcemap>
    <maps datatype="bibtex" map_overwrite="1">
      <map>
        <map_step map_field_set="ABSTRACT" map_null="1"/>
      </map>
    </maps>
  </sourcemap>
</config>

With recent versions of biblatex and Biber you can put

\DeclareSourcemap{
  \maps[datatype=bibtex]{
    \map{
      \step[fieldset=abstract, null]
    }
  }
}

into your preamble to obtain the same result.

[Tex/LaTex] !Misplaced alignment tab character & in bibtex entry

The behaviour is not as dumb as it appears at first sight. You have to understand that entries in a .bib file only make their way into LaTeX indirectly. After a change has been made, the new and correct entries will not find their way in until after the next bibtex run. Until then, the old and incorrect entries, which are sitting in the .bbl file that bibtex produced last time will continue to be used. That is the source of your error on this occasion. Your rerun sequence didn't "change nothing": it changed the contents of the .bbl file.

Three ways to solve this:

After updating the .bib file, run bibtex again before running LaTeX. That only works if all you have changed is the .bib file. It won't work if, for instance, you have added a citation to the TeX source file too.
Run LaTeX again, ignoring any errors, and then run bibtex and then LaTeX. That is what you did here, evidently.
Delete the various files that LaTeX produces or uses as it runs (.aux and .bbl in particular, and then regenerate the document from scratch. That isn't really different from the previous option, but it avoids you seeing any errors at all, and in some cases (if an error is so bad that it really causes LaTeX to choke fatally) it's the only thing to do.

As a rough rule of thumb, if you ever get errors which are caused by something in the .bib file, it's probably a good idea to go back to a clean slate. Many editors will offer an easy way of deleting the cruft files. The same is also true for anything else that puts data into external files (such as glossaries, indexes, and so forth, even tables of contents and labels in extreme cases): if you find yourself getting hard-to-explain errors which persist even after you think you've put things right, going back to a clean sheet is often wise.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Error with percent sign in bib entry field when using biblatex/biber

[Tex/LaTex] !Misplaced alignment tab character & in bibtex entry

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