Interview with PLK

PLK

Jul 30, 2012 17:58

Ah, finally I work out how to log in

Paulo Cereda

@PLK Yay! Welcome! :)

PLK

Good evening al

Paulo Cereda

:)

PLK

I mean "all", realising that there is an Alan here

Paulo Cereda

Friends, shall we start? :)

PLK

Jul 30, 2012 18:01

As luck would have it, I was just looking at a biblatex bug which Joseph W found so I am probably as ready as it gets ...

Paulo Cereda

@PLK I think Joseph did that on purpose. :P

PLK

The timing was impressive

I think I should say a little bit perhaps about how I got involved as there are two important people to mention who aren't here

Paulo Cereda

@PLK :)

Dear friends, welcome to the TeXtalk! Our interviewee today is Philip Kime (PLK).

Guys, feel free to ask PLK any question. :)

@PLK: Could you tell us a bit about yourself?

PLK

Before I do, I just want to say that that biber and biblatex owe a great deal to two people who aren't here - François Charette for the original biber code and Philipp Lehman for the incredible work he did on biblatex.

6

We all wish PL well, wherever he may be.

15

For me, well, my background is in academia originally - Philosophy, then AI, then CogSci PhD and then out of academia and now an species of psycho-analyst living in Switzerland.

Alan Munn

@PLK So are you no longer an active LaTeX user, or do you still use it professionally?

PLK

Jul 30, 2012 18:10

Oh I am very active again now - I write everything with it again now.

I use LaTeX for a long time during masters/PhD years, then forgot it for years and then came back in 2007 and found biblatex. I needed an APA (American Psychological Association) style but there wasn't one ...

So, I started to write one and found that some of the things it needed (auto-disambiguation of names lists mainly) couldn't be done because of the bibtex backend. Then in 2009 I found biber which was in Perl, a language I know quite well and like a lot and so I offered to help.

2

There was an explosion of development on biber in 2009/2010 and when François had to bow out due to a busy life, I pretty much re-wrote all of it over 2010/2011.

Lehman and I were working quite closely during that time and it's been very difficult with him gone as my TeX skills are miniscule compared to his. Thankfully we have Joseph W and Audrey B helping out with biblatex too.

Joseph Wright

@PLK Sounds like a lot of work! Would you say Biber is 'feature-complete' yet, or are there significant things you still want to add?

(From your point of view: users always want more features)

PLK

There are two larger issues to look at with biber I think - one is multi-script support so that you can switch between scripts in the same entry for translated, romanised etc. versions of titles etc.

Paulo Cereda

@JosephWright (Tell me about it. My issue tracker scares me.) :P

PLK

The other is related - a more flexible data format - .bib is hard to extend, even though we have user-definable data models in biblatex 2.0/biber 1.0.

François was working on that a couple of years ago with his "bibaltexml" XML data format and that looks promising but I haven't done too much with it yet. It does support multi-script already but you have to decide on the script to use per-entry and you can't mix and match within an entry using biblatex macros yet. That means major .bbl redesign.

Joseph Wright

@PLK That's quite challenging: I assume the plan is XML-based, but that approach is never going to be as accessible as .bib for the large number of users for whom it already works.

PLK

Jul 30, 2012 18:18

Right - which is why we also need a .bib<->XML converter for it to be interesting to anyone. That's not so hard for biber to do itself as it converts any data source into an internal model which is source neutral.

It needs some thought. I've tried a couple of prototypes but there are tricky issues with, as usual, names.

Anyway, I'd like the large amount of new features in 2.0/1.0 to settle in a bit first - there are a lot ...

Joseph Wright

@PLK Sounds like a good plan

PLK

I really like the customisable labels feature - the auto-disambiguation schemes for these were a real swine to program though. I don't know any other bibliography system with as sophisticated auto-disambiguation features as biblatex+biber ...

Paulo Cereda

@PLK: could you tell us about some cool features of 2.0/1.0? :)

PLK

So, customisable labels - Instead of the static labels in alphabetic styles for, say "Smith 1958" looking like "Smi98" or whatever, you can define a template so say what the labels look like.

say you have "Smith and Jones, 1934" -> [SJ34] but also "Simons and Jacob, 1934" -> [SJ34], biber can auto-disambiguate these, just like with name lists

There are several ways to disambiguate, for different tastes.

You can tell it to expand the name parts to the point of no ambiguity, to restrict how long the labels get, to make them unique pointers into the references or not etc. It's quite sophisticated.

Paulo Cereda

@PLK It sounds really powerful. :)

PLK

Jul 30, 2012 18:25

The biblatex manual has some nice examples of this

Joseph Wright

@PLK Are the new features things you need, or is this mainly driven by users?

PLK

Mainly users.

The name list uniqueness features (uniquelist option) was exactly what I needed for the APA style - it took several years from needing it to having in my APA biblatex style - that was very satisfying.

The Datamodel stuff in 2.0 is quite nice - it gets away from all those "usersa", "lista" custom fields and types which make a .bib file look really arbitrary

This is something I needed for APA style too but I think it's generally very useful.

With the biber "sourcemapping" feature, which lets you alter the bib data source on the fly without touching the actual files, this is quite powerful.

This mapping stuff had a biblatex interface added in 2.0.

Paulo Cereda

@PLK Sounds exciting!

PLK

Audrey did some great work putting the biblatex interface in for biber's "related entries" feature.

Instead of people requesting endless new fields for "translated as" or "reprint of" etc. There is a now a fully localised interface for adding any "relation" to another entry you like.

Marco Daniel

@PLK: It is very rarely that psycho-analysts are programmers. How do you become one?

PLK

Jul 30, 2012 18:31

A side-effect of the masters in AI and Cosgsci things. I only learnt Prolog and Lisp originally, naturally and when I realised how really silly it was to try to write useful utilities in Prolog, I forced myself to learn Perl ...

I did have a working cassette inlay printing program, via LaTeX in Prolog which I used for years as a student ...

Biber being in Perl was a real stumbling block for wider acceptance originally until I worked out how to distribute it as a binary

Without this, it's really hard/impossible to get something into TeXLive in a maintainable manner

Paulo Cereda

@PLK: how do you get involved in the biblatex/biber project?

PLK

With biber originally, as I found a bug in a very early version in 2009 and reported it to François Charette.

After a while, it was clear that biblatex/biber needed a common release schedule as the features were closely related. So we spoke to Lehman and developed the XML .bcf format to replace the .aux of bibtex and after that, biblatex+biber were essentially one project.

Marco Daniel

@PLK: You are one of the top users of biblatex. You are the maintainer of biber + biblatex. I think very often you are reading such tagged answers. Could you learn something at tex stackexchange? Or did you get any inspiration for your work? Or on the other site how often do you close your eyes ;-)?

PLK

I have to say the programming is quite a nice compensation for psychoanalytic work. It's concrete, has a defined end.

3

Actually, I learn a great deal from the site - it is very frequent that I see an interesting question, follow it up and find some marvellous package/trick I will use.

It is quite remarkable really, I've been around the web since it existed (I remember the first picture causing a real stir ...)

So to find "yet another forum site" which really has such a superb signal/noise ratio is quite amazing.

I am constantly amazed with TikZ and pstricks, for example.

To do what they can do without a huge, ugly beast of a drawing package is quite amazing.

It's a bit like Perl for me - Perl has CPAN, TeX has CTAN. It's so rare you need to write anything significant yourself, it's very useful.

Alan Munn

Although I'm sure this will change over time, one current drawback to biblatex/biber at the moment is the fact that most journals that accept LaTeX files won't accept biblatex. See e.g. tex.stackexchange.com/q/12175/2693 One thing that would help this would be a way to have the bibliography incorporated after the fact into the LaTeX file. Is this something that might be possible?

PLK

Jul 30, 2012 18:44

Right, this is a good question. It's hard at the moment as the .bbl is basically a TeX database instead of formatting macros. The formatting stuff comes much later on in the style and so you don't have anything resembling a core TeX/LaTeX file you can send.

One possibility would be to have biblatex dump another .bbl-like thing just before finishing.

Something after all the style stuff has been resolved. But it's more likely that journals will need to start using biblatex eventually for some things - it has to be attractive once the initial hurdle is over ...

Paulo Cereda

@PLK: Joseph, Audrey and especially you are doing a wonderful job. How can someone volunteer to help?

(/me is included)

PLK

Just mail us - I do get worried about biber more than biblatex - there are a lot of good TeX people but in the long term, I really need someone who knows Perl to get familiar with the code as it's really to dangerous to have a large user base and only one maintainer ...

2

biber is a bit of a beast - there are some really complex things that it does and it takes a while to get familiar with what biber does and what biblatex does and why

Though the XML .bcf file has been really useful here - biber only reads the .bcf and biblatex only reads the .bbl so their communication is very well defined.

One amusing feature which is actually quite useful if you every try it is the Graphviz output - if you have complex inheritance/XDATA/related entries/sets etc. you can opt to output GraphViz DOT format and then convert this to PDF, SVG or whatever so you can visualise the data relationships.

This was done as a proof of concept of biber's modular input/output format design.

Paulo Cereda

@PLK Impressive!

PLK

For the future, I would also like to see more input formats recognised. I have been (as have many) trying to urge the Zotero people to put a citation key as a first class field in their database (I know, it sounds amazing, there isn't one ...) so that it would be easier to access Zotero data directly as a data source but so far, years later, nothing ...

Paulo Cereda

@PLK: I used the biblatex/biber combo for the first time in a document two months ago and immediately fell in love with it. What's their secret? :)

PLK

Jul 30, 2012 18:58

Well, more and more and especially in version 2.0 of biblatex, all of the really nice features are biber only ...

This isn't a political thing, it's just not possible to do them with bibtex as the data backend.

Paulo Cereda

@PLK Indeed. :)

PLK

Unicode, of course, is a big thing these days and Perl is really good at Unicode - it's a central part of the language and they take great pains to keep it very up to date.

The great Unicode::Collate module is why biber can sort just about anything. In fact, it was partly at biber's urging that the maintainer of that module addedd CLDR support which is essential to biber now. I notice that the Scandanavian contingent on T.SE use this.

Try sorting Swedish properly in just about about any other bibliography system - you have to have CLDR support really.

Well, I appreciate the chance to air some of the biber/biblatex news and history chaps.

Paulo Cereda

@PLK: I see nowadays people going towards scripts implemented in Lua, probably because of LuaTeX and the language itself. Out of curiosity, did anyone ask for a Lua port of biber? :)

@PLK It's an honour to hear from you. :)

PLK

Yes, someone did, a while ago. I thought about it for about a second ... that's too much work for me alone. I'd need to know that Lua can do Unicode and CLDR, XML and regular expressions at least as well as Perl before I would touch that topic ...

Volunteers are most welcome - I have a nice test suite I run before every release ...

I have to leave, unfortunately - there is a urgent need to be fed currently being matched by a congruent offer to feed which I can ignore no longer ...

Many thanks for allowing this niche within a niche some space ...

Paulo Cereda

@PLK hehe don't worry. :) I'll let the interview open, so you can answer any questions later, when you have some time. :)

@PLK Again, the honour is ours. :)

PLK

Jul 30, 2012 19:13

Ah, ok, perfect, I thought it had a time limit - in that case I can look in later or tomorrow if anyone would like to know anything

Paulo Cereda

:)

Friends, feel free to write questions to PLK. :)

Paulo Cereda

Jul 30, 2012 19:38

@PLK: I have these questions. :)

1. Could you name one of the most wanted features for biber/biblatex?
2. Do you have a favorite answer of yours in this site?
3. Can you name something you really like in LaTeX? And is there something you dislike? :)
4. What do you recommend for a newbie eager to learn TeX, LaTeX and friends? :)

@PLK: Do you have any suggestions for our interview lion's clothing? :)

PLK

Jul 30, 2012 19:55

Question 1: Multi-script support is really the only outstanding current request, so many features were added in 2.0 ...

Question 2: I have to say that I like tex.stackexchange.com/questions/29402/… - it reminds me of all the HPL I read as a teenager and also shows some very clever solutions

egreg

Sorry, but my Internet connection is not very stable. What do you suggest for tackling advanced biblatex/biber?

Paulo Cereda

@egreg: welcome! :)

PLK

Question 3: LaTeX - I really like LaTeX tables - booktabs, dislike font control still - it can be such a pain.

Question 4: I still think the original Lamport book is a good place to start

@egreg - I would recommend reading section 4.5 of the biblatex manual. It's entitled "Customization" but it basically contains all of the more interesting 2.0 features with lots of examples.

egreg

@PLK Any idea about a book on biblatex/biber?

PLK

I think the examples in there really give you a sense of some of the things which are possible.

Kannappan Sampath

Jul 30, 2012 20:03

@PLK When did you start using (La)TeX? Did you use any other typesetting system before you started to use (La)TeX?

PLK

@egreg -= I think this would be great, especially to let academic publishers know what they could do with it. I can't see me having the time for this in the near future though.

@Kannapp - I started with LaTeX in 1992 as I remember, before that, it was a miserable haze of WordPerfect, well before any windowing systems existed on PCs ...

Kannappan Sampath

(Meta: @Paulo Do I \begin{enumerate}[resume] my question?)

Joseph Wright

@PLK So 2.09?

PLK

Yes, 2.09

I remember the change to 2e quite well

It was all on old SunOS 4 workstations

Paulo Cereda

@KannappanSampath Don't worry, questions don't need to follow a specific order. :) We will rearrange that later, offline. :)

PLK

Jul 30, 2012 20:07

I remember being quite excited by the nfss at the time ...

It made fonts ... possible ...

And graphics were almost always done in monochrome using the venerable xfig to dvi ...

EPS was a real challenge

Kannappan Sampath

(Meta: @Paulo Do you allow some non-TeXnical questions?)

Paulo Cereda

@KannappanSampath Sure! :) Last interview, we asked what Andrew eats for breakfast. :)

Kannappan Sampath

OK, @Paulo. Here is what I had in mind for @PLK:

So, can you please tell us about your time at academia?

Paulo Cereda

@PLK: Any hints for a Perl newbie? :)

PLK

Jul 30, 2012 20:24

Academia - now there's a question. Well, in the end, I got tired of it and left because the context for philosophy in universities is, to my mind, fundamentally flawed. A "professional philosopher" is an absurd category, both conceptually and in many unfortunate examples which I came across.

I still teach but in a context which is somewhat less protected from "applied philosophy", that is, life.

Perl - easier to answer (which is part of the attraction, naturally). The standard O'Reilly books are great, they give you all you need to start. It's not a hard language, the problem is mainly to find some idioms you like and just stick with them since there are so many ways to do that same thing in Perl.

Gonzalo Medina

@PLK Do you think an analogous to makebst will be developed for biblatex?

Kannappan Sampath

@PLK Can you please elaborate a bit more on your last assertion about professional philosophers?

PLK

@Gonzalo - It's more likely to be a document/book I think. The problem is that with biblatex - there are so many parameters, presenting any meaningful question/answer interface short of a full IDE would be meaningless.

Paulo Cereda

@GonzaloMedina (You are giving me an idea.) :P

PLK

A style design interface would be nice - perhaps the LyX people could help ...

Joseph Wright

Jul 30, 2012 20:30

@PLK I think it would be useful to match makebst, i.e. to cover the needs of people moving from working BibTeX set ups

Paulo Cereda

@PLK I was thinking of some interface. :)

PLK

@Joseph

@Joseph - it would be nice but it seems intractably hard to me?

@Paulo - yes, some sort of guideded style creator perhaps - it would have to write .bbx/.cbx/.dbx files presumably

Joseph Wright

@PLK No, I think quite doable (but then I am a LaTeX kernel developer). It's a question of time for me: I'm already busy

Kannappan Sampath

@PLK That you teach means (to me) you would be passionate about meeting youngsters. What is your message for youngsters?

PLK

@Kannapp - My issue with professional philosophy is rather a topic, especially since one could arge that I'm not a thousand miles from such a thing now.

@Joseph - Oh, for you, I don't doubt it!

@Kannapp - teaching was the only important thing in it for me. That is phenomenally important. There is no message for all youngsters, only each one individually and that takes time and not the context of classroom philosophy (or classroom anything, when you really get down to it).

@Kannapp - teaching older people is also very important - the idea that education is mainly up until mid 20s or whatever is absurd to me. There are some things one is simply unable to learn at all until mid-life.

Paulo Cereda

Jul 30, 2012 20:38

@PLK: any suggestion for my lion drawing? :)

PLK

@Kannapp - It could suddenly be quite silly - trying to talk to a room of 18 year-olds about, say morality when they barely know anything concretely about any kind of real moral dilemma and won't for many years but by which time they will not consider for a moment learning about such things.

@Paulo - where is the drawing?

Paulo Cereda

@PLK Oh, it's our interview lion. I always add something new.

$user image$

PLK

What does the stereotypical librarian look like? that seems appropriate for biblatex

Kannappan Sampath

@PLK Thanks for your insightful comments. I am happy that you emphasise that education is really a continuum and that it takes longer to appreciate deeper aspects of life. And also emphasizing that each youngster is a distinct entity.

Paulo Cereda

@PLK Ooh I'll try to draw one! :)

PLK

Jul 30, 2012 20:42

@Paulo - perhaps a cloak, library ticket and book?

Paulo Cereda

@PLK I'll draw one! :)

PLK

@Paulo - Ok, that way you can offend all librarians with a sterotype and not me ... still, not known for being the most difficult of adversaries ...

@paulo - so you may survive ...

Paulo Cereda

@PLK don't worry, I'll draw a cute librarian lion. :)

PLK

@Paulo - You may be quietly and persistently fined for overdue books to death ...

Kannappan Sampath

@PLK I should just inform you that @Paulo is a great artist -- you must see his duck -- ducks away

PLK

Jul 30, 2012 20:45

I have heard of these ducks.

Are there any current exhibitions where one might view them?

Paulo Cereda

:)

Alan Munn

@PLK Since you're still here, I've got another question. One thing I find frustrating about biblatex is that it's not always clear what's the right way to implement a particular formatting issue. Sometimes there seem to be solutions built-in, and other times you have to dig into the code. (Maybe this is just par for the LaTeX course, but I'm wondering if you have any advice for how to figure out these kinds of things.

Paulo Cereda

@PLK Just query "duck" in the other chatroom. :P

Alan Munn

I'm speaking as someone who is both an end user and writing a style for my field.

Kannappan Sampath

@PLK The oldest here and the most recent I know of... @PLK

PLK

Jul 30, 2012 20:50

@AlanMunn - You're right, this is a problem. Currently, there is no other way than to dredge through the biblatex manual and see if some nice macro does what you want. Most things can be done in \print{field,name,list} etc. formats with DeclareFormat and I tend to find that this is a good place to put things but there is no consistency in this.

@Paulo - a Duck with anatomically limiting bounding boxes makes it looks like a butcher's poster of the best cuts ...

3

Paulo Cereda

@PLK Oh! :D

PLK

@AlanMunn - it's part of the price for having all the formatting in styles - it's impressive to me how much structure Lehman managed to impose on style creation given that it could just be a freeform TeX-fest

Kannappan Sampath

@Paulo I'd like to express my interest in editing entries for the community blog. (I am sure I am far from writing something TeXnically meaningful and substantial but however I can edit some entries if ever needed.)

Paulo Cereda

@KannappanSampath You can join our review team. :) /pokes @JosephWright

PLK

@AlanMunn - it's up to style writers to provide package options which hide this from users. The default styles dont' do this much though because they need to be generic enough to be copied and hacked so there are not so many good exemplars. I would hope with more academic journals and publishers adopting biblatex, some rigorous styles would be made which made all of the hacky looking options stuff into package options which gave a neater interface.

Alan Munn

Jul 30, 2012 20:55

@PLK Yes, that's definitely true. And I've managed to get most of the things I want done. Luckily we have some real experts here (including yourself) so it's not hard to get answers when needed, also. I'm particularly impressed with Audrey's knowledge of biblatex.

PLK

@alanMunn - If you are a style writer though, biblatex does assume you will read and digest the entire manual ... there has been some discussion recently here about a "Quick Start" guide for biblatex which might address this sort of thing ...

@AlanMunn - yes, Audrey is quite amazing - really in-depth answers very swiftly. Probably the most advanced user I know.

Alan Munn

@PLK Sure, I certainly agree on that. For end users though, the documentation is a bit daunting. (And some of the default decisions (like using 'In:' for articles) are really odd.

PLK

@AlanMunn - It's one of the reasons I invest some time in providing answers with examples now that 2.0/1.0 is out - there needs to be a critical mass of answers for some of these things in the short term.

@AlanMunn - Don't forget that Lehman was quite influenced by the requirements and defaults of German academics as there is a large user base there (for biber releases, the largest demographic of initial downloads from SF is always German Windows users ...) and so things like "In:" I suspect reflect that.

Alan Munn

@PLK Yes, that's a big help. Also, most of us are not used to using the backend to do things, so I'm always very interested to see your answers that work that way.

@PLK Maybe so. It's certainly never used in any English publication that I'm aware of.

PLK

@AlanMunn - Yes, this is something that a quick guide would do - it would make a bit clearer the division of labour between biblatex and biber. The biber manual has a couple of diagrams showing what it actually does and when.

Kannappan Sampath

Jul 30, 2012 21:02

@PauloCereda Looking forward to it.

PLK

Dear all, I really need to go to bed - have to be up early but I'll look in in the morning and see if there is anything else to reply to.

Paulo Cereda

@PLK Thanks again. :)

Paulo Cereda

Jul 30, 2012 21:55

@PLK: how do you like my humble attempt? :)

PLK

Jul 31, 2012 04:03

Impressive. If you could just make that book real, people would be grateful ...

Joseph Wright

Jul 31, 2012 08:10

@PauloCereda I will look into this. The Powers That Be seem to have altered the blog back-end a bit, so I will need to check on things.

Paulo Cereda

Jul 31, 2012 09:16

@PLK: Thanks a million for this great interview! :)

@JosephWright Thanks! :)

matth

Jul 31, 2012 12:08

hi, missed the interview yesterday, so maybe it is ok to ask a question (or rather make a suggestion) today: just a couple of days ago I learned that Zotero defined a Citation Style Language (CSL) to describe citation styles. CSL is now also used by Mendeley. So if some time in the future a biblatex equivalent to makebst will be available, maybe it is possible that this makebst-equivalent can process CSL files

PLK

Jul 31, 2012 17:17

This would be a good idea I think - it would be essentially a more structured input to the process than asking some questions.

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