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I'm editing some notes in LaTeX using the Tufte-book class. I know I can use the natbib package with that class, but I've never used. I used bibtex recently. I like to use biblatex in this case as my document and references hence are in Spanish and not in English and also because I have references in German.

I know that bibtex is not as easy to use and customize without programming and be an advanced user if I require cite something in another language than English. But I don't know if it's possible to use biblatex with this class and how it would be, if I have to add some lines or load packages before \documentclass. I was searching on the internet but I found nothing conclusive or give me any certainty.

Another issue is that as this document is of Humanities, I require do citations using Latin expressions such as op. cit. and others. I have seen that this is possible with biblatex.

This is my MWE but I have not included the bibliography yet. I'm building it with JabRef, but my other question is, if I download references from Internet such as Google Scholar I can get the references in bibtex format, but I'm not sure if I can use it right in biblatex. Until now the only type of reference I have is @book.

\documentclass[10pt]{tufte-book}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenx}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[spanish,mexico]{babel}
\usepackage{mwe}

\setcounter{secnumdepth}{1}

\title{My Book}
\author{John Doe}
\date{\today}

\begin{document}
\maketitle
\frontmatter

\blindtext

\mainmatter

\blindtext

\backmatter

% Here should be the bibliography

\end{document}

The idea is to can get something like this:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod
tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam,
quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo
consequat.~\cite{Engels1894}. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in 
voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur 
sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt 
mollit anim id est laborum~\cite{Engels1894}.

This should display a cite for the first time, and Op. cit. in the second one.

One of my references (in the example above):

@Book{Engels1894,
  Title                    = {Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und des Staats: im Anschluss an Lewis H. Morgans Forschungen},
  Author                   = {Engels, Friedrich},
  Publisher                = {J. H. W. Dietz},
  Year                     = {1894},
  Address                  = {Stuttgart},
  Edition                  = {6},
  Pages                    = {177,178}
}

Any suggestions?

Aradnix
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    Add the langid field or its alias hyphenation to the bibtex entries to identify the language in which they have written, and biblatex will switch to that language fir those entries. – Guido Aug 31 '14 at 07:16
  • And how the langid works? – Aradnix Aug 31 '14 at 07:26
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    You can use biblatex with tufte (it seems) Can I use biblatex with Tufte classes? (that question is 2 years old though) (see also natbib is out, biblatex is in). biblatex can deal with .bib files for BibTeX, but sometimes it is better to modify them to get the most out of biblatex's capabilities (your bib entry is fine). – moewe Aug 31 '14 at 07:49
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    For op. cit. and other scholarly abbreviations, you might want to have a look at the doc and the vast number of styles it offers (have a look at verbose and the styles derived from verbose, pp. 66-67; if something is not to your linking though, don't hesitate to ask a specific question). langid just tells biblatex what language you would like the work to use if you enable the autolang option (p. 48) which switches the language on a per-entry basis. (I'm not sure what exactly you are after though.) – moewe Aug 31 '14 at 07:53
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    Use languid = "german" for an entry written in German. See section 2.2.4 of the biblatex manual, i.e. texdoc biblatex from terminal or command line. – Guido Aug 31 '14 at 08:01
  • @moewe The same think, however would like to know what modifications would have to do to use biblatex smoothly. Especially since I'm starting to build my database of references. Thanks for the links. – Aradnix Aug 31 '14 at 17:23
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    I should think the modifications mentioned in the link(s) above should be enough, if a document is produced without errors (and warnings) afterwards. (If not, just ask a more specific question about that later.) – moewe Aug 31 '14 at 17:31
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    Or were you referring to your .bib database? As a rule of thumb I would say: You do not have to change anything if you are fine with the output, especially if your database looks roughly like the example above. biblatex offers a bunch of features not supported by BibTeX (styles) and in order to use those you might have to use non-BibTeX-standard fields (see Compatibility of bibtex and biblatex bibliography files?, What to do to switch to biblatex?,) – moewe Aug 31 '14 at 17:33
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    From my experience I could list some things you might like to consider when changing to biblatex. (1) Sometimes one finds howpublished = {\url{http://example.com} accessed on 1 January 2010} in .bib files, that would be url = {http://example.com}, urldate = {2010-01-01} in biblatex. (2) biblatex's date fields offer yyyy-mm-dd syntax, so we can have date = {2014-05-06} instead of year = {2014}, month = {05}, day = {06},. (3) There is a dedicated doi field, so you don't have to use url for that. ... Just have a look at all the entry types and fields in the documentation. – moewe Aug 31 '14 at 17:43
  • Do you want to write up an answer to your question (or make a little bit more specific, so that one can come up with a concise answer [or split the question])? I feel as it stands now, your question contains quite a lot of sub-questions. – moewe Sep 04 '14 at 14:51
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    @moewe Thanks, let me finish with the book, and in the weekend I'll start to play with the references, then I can comment and make more questions about this. I wanted to make a proof before, but later I changed my mind and now I prefer to get all the material running on LaTeX first, and add the references in the end. – Aradnix Sep 04 '14 at 17:57
  • Have you been able to think about this question and make it more specific and more fit to the Q&A style? Otherwise, I think it is too broad and is very unlikely attract a satisfying answer. – moewe Sep 11 '14 at 07:02
  • To reiterate ad 1: It is possible to use tufte with biblatex (see Can I use biblatex with Tufte classes? and links therein). (2) biblatex has great capabilities to deal with multi-language documents and bibliographies (but what is it you want, and how is what you get with a reasonable doc setup off from where you want to be). (3) Yes, some biblatex styles offer scholarly abbreviations (especially the verbose ones); again, you need to be more precise about what you want and how what you have tried so far cannot give you what you need. – moewe Sep 11 '14 at 07:06
  • (4) All well-formed .bib files for BibTeX use should be usable with biblatex without problems. But because biblatex offers a superset of functions and fields, some .bib files could be tweaked to yield better results when using them. But again, there would need to be a more or less specific case here, so we can give you proper advice. And what constitutes a "good" .bib file for biblatex very often depends on personal preference, desired output and much more. – moewe Sep 11 '14 at 07:11
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    ... One could, for example, strive to use all the fields only as described in the documentation. Then in your example, the proper way to give the pages field is pages = {177-178}, or (177--178). An example about what constitutes a good style is probably examples-biblatex.bib. Other than that you just need to remind yourself that biblatex has specialist fields for all sorts of things and use those (dedictaed URL and DOI fields, URL date etc.). – moewe Sep 11 '14 at 07:15
  • I'm a bit confused here: why have you voted to close your own question as unclear? – Joseph Wright Sep 23 '14 at 07:40
  • @JosephWright I don't know, maybe because it was at the end. – Aradnix Sep 23 '14 at 07:59

0 Answers0