Weird compile result -- bug?

[Paul A. Rubin]

On 10/16/21 10:45 AM, Jürgen Spitzmüller wrote:
> Am Samstag, dem 16.10.2021 um 09:32 -0400 schrieb Paul A. Rubin:
>> That still leaves the question of whether what I originally saw was
>> unique to my system or would happen to anyone who opened a LyX doc
>> using biblatex with biber on a system that does not have biber
>> installed. Unfortunately, to test that you would need a biber-less
>> system.
> The same will happen to other persons without biber installation. The
> question is: How common is that?
>
> What we could do is implement some warnings that inform these people
> that the document expects biber but it isn't available, which is why a
> fallback is used that results in (potentially) inferior output and also
> might change the document settings.
>
> Jürgen
>
>
On Ubuntu and Mint with TeXLive, biblatex comes in one of the TeXLive 
packages (texlive-latex-recommended?) but biber requires installation of 
a separate package ("biber") that does not contain TeXLive in its name. 
So I suspect it is not uncommon to install biblatex (via TeXLive) and 
not have biber. Since biblatex still works, they may be fine ... until 
someone sends them a LyX file that selects biber. LyX changes that to 
"default" and the adventure begins.

Actually, though, the bigger concern for me is that (before I installed 
biber and reconfigured) arbitrary edits to the preamble in such a file 
changed the biblatex load command that LyX put in the .tex file. 
Switching the processor from biber to default (or bibtex) when LyX 
cannot find biber seems reasonable to me, but doing it somewhat randomly 
is a bit too idiosyncratic for me. As I originally wrote, just adding a 
space at the end of the preamble was enough to change LyX's behavior on 
my system.

Paul

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