TIL:

1. Using an otherlanguage environment in the abstract environment produces spurious “unresolved references” that can never be resolved. Using otherlanguage* seems to avoid this problem.

2. biber sometimes simply stops working. The solution is to delete its cache, e.g., by saying rm -rf $(biber --cache)

Is it just me, or has become very brittle?

@true_mxp has it ever been better, or did our expectations/use cases just become more challenging (e.g. multilingualism), which brings the internal inconsistencies to the surface?

@felwert Both, I guess. Package development moves much faster today, which is good in some respects, but also leads to instability and incompatibilities.

The days when you could say that, in contrast to Word, you can still process your LaTeX files from 10 years ago, are definitely over. This is one reason why I switched from to Markdown ( + ): I could no longer reasonably expect my slides from last semester to compile without changes.

@true_mxp Yes, I’m also exclusively using #pandoc these days. With #docker, you even get an actually reproducible build environment (not for the occasional slide set, but for larger projects). That way, it’s only the pandoc devs/contributors who have to keep track of the #LaTeX developments (if one still wants to use TeX for PDF builds).

@felwert Exactly my reasoning as well :-)

I hope to be able to replace LaTeX for PDF generation at some point: it’s so slow :-(

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