16

I just spent an hour trying to understand Bibtex, but I find it very hard to find simple instructions. I even read half of the manual. I put this in my LaTeX file report.ex:

% preamble

\usepackage[backend=biber]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{refs.bib}

% ...
% document

blaha \cite{guyton-hall}

\printbibliography

In refs.bib, I put:

@book{guyton-hall,
    author = {Guyton, Arthur C. and Hall, John E.},
    day = {01},
    edition = {11},
    howpublished = {Hardcover},
    isbn = {0721602401},
    keywords = {physiology},
    month = sep,
    publisher = {Elsevier Saunders},
    title = {Textbook of medical physiology},
    year = {2006}
}

What now? The manual talked about running bibtex on my AUX file, but then bibtex complains:

$ bibtex report
This is BibTeX, Version 0.99c (TeX Live 2009/Debian)
The top-level auxiliary file: report.aux
I found no \citation commands---while reading file report.aux
I found no \bibdata command---while reading file report.aux
I found no \bibstyle command---while reading file report.aux
(There were 3 error messages)

That happens after running pdflatex report.tex a couple of times. What am I doing wrong? And why is it so hard?

(And why should I even run bibtex when I'm using biblatex and biber?)

lockstep
  • 250,273
Andreas
  • 163
  • @lockstep: It worked! Thank you! Any idea what I could do if I want biber? – Andreas Dec 16 '11 at 15:55
  • 1
    The reason I used biber first was that biblatex told me so due to UTF8 encoding. Later, I also read in the manual that bibtex and bibtex8 have problems with long citation lists. – Andreas Dec 16 '11 at 15:56
  • I'm not sure I'm following. Did you run bibtex, biber or both? biber should be available if you have an up to day install of TeXLive. – qubyte Dec 16 '11 at 16:02
  • @Mark: Biber was not available, so maybe 2009 (in the Ubuntu reps) isn't up to day. – Andreas Dec 16 '11 at 16:03
  • Ah, yes Ubuntu is running a scarily old version of TeXLive. If it becomes an issue then installing a newer TeXLive is not difficult. – qubyte Dec 16 '11 at 16:19

1 Answers1

12

You must either use biber as backend or (in case biber isn't available) issue \usepackage[backend=bibtex8]{biblatex} in the preamble. Consider to use latexmk to compile your .tex document -- it will automatically detect if bibtex or biber should be used as a backend.

See also What to do to switch to biblatex? and bibtex vs. biber and biblatex vs. natbib.

Community
  • 1
lockstep
  • 250,273