Overriding of settings in biber config file (tool mode)
Closed this issue · 8 comments
Would you consider making biber look at both user-specified (via the --configfile option) and default settings, with the former overriding the latter. It seems a bit cumbersome and inefficient to specify the great majority of the default settings all over again whenever I want to customise just one or two.
Are you seeing some strange behaviour as this is already what should happen for the normal --configfile - you don't have to specify everything.
Ah sorry, I didn't realise. The way I read the man page implied (to me) I needed to specify everything all over again. Let me try that.
That's only for the tool-mode config file because there is no .bcf file in that case and therefore no defaults.
So tool mode doesn't use the default biber-tool.conf file after all, if a custom one is specified as well?
In tool mode, biber-tool.conf is used to set defaults because there is no .bcf but apart from that, it's the same and you can use the --configfile or command-line options to override the defaults.
Oh, I see... that's where I was getting confused. I thought the default biber-tool.conf plus custom settings were used in 'normal' mode, whereas it's really just the settings derived from the .bcf, right? Whereas in tool mode, it's the default biber-tool.conf file plus (optionally) a user-provided conf file?
Correct - biber-tool.conf is used instead of the .bcf in normal mode because there is no .bcf in tool mode. Then, the configfile and/or command-line arguments override either of these. However, some options are biblatex options which are passed to biber (via the .bcf) which is why in tool mode, you may need to use a custom biber-tool.conf because there are not configfile/command-line options to change the biblatex options. Examples are sorting templates, labelling templates etc.
Thanks for the clarification!