Configuring Texmaker for BibLaTeX

Question

I'm trying to write my first LaTeX document, but I'm getting a wired error message with regards to using Texmaker to use biblatex. Whenever I try to compile my code the log highlights my \begin{document} line and states the following:

! Package biblatex Error: file "'Document name".bbl' not created by biblatex.

Where "Document name" is the name of my LaTeX file.

Here's my preamble:

\documentclass[11pt, twoside]{article}
\usepackage[margin = 2.5cm]{geometry}
\usepackage{amsfonts,mathtools,amssymb, amsthm}
\numberwithin{equation}{subsection}

\usepackage[none]{hyphenat}
\usepackage{gensymb}
\usepackage{changepage}
\usepackage{xcolor}
\usepackage{xfrac}
\usepackage{tabu}
\usepackage{booktabs,caption}
\usepackage[flushleft]{threeparttable}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{float}
\usepackage{tabularx}

\usepackage[
    backend=biber,
    style = authoryear
    ]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{citations.bib}

Strangely, my test document for biblatex does work, which has the source code:

\documentclass[11pt]{article}

\usepackage[backend = biber,
    style = authoryear
]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{RFCN-citations.bib}

\begin{document}
This is a text for bibLaTeX. \cite{HistOfMaths}

\printbibliography
\end{document}

I'm using Texmaker v5.0.2 and Windows 10 as my environment. I've made sure to configure Texmaker, as per the following screencaps:

I've been trying for 3 days now to get some sort of automated references within my document via some LaTeX package, and it's really starting to drive me insane.

Answer 1

When you first compile your .tex file, you produce some other files with information about the bibliography. You then run another tool to produce a .bbl file. That file is then read back when you recompile your document to produce the bibliography and citations.

But the format of the .bbl file depends on the tools you're using to generate the bibliography.

• If you use BibTeX, the .bbl has a pretty straightforward format, which looks pretty much as your bibliography would look if you entered it by hand using the thebibliography environment.

• If you use Biblatex and Biber, the .bbl has a very different format, which looks nothing like code for your bibliography would look if you entered it manually. This is because Biblatex parses this file in a much more sophisticated way.

The upshot of this is that whether you use Biblatex/Biber or BibTeX, the .bbl is read in when you recompile the document but, the format of that file has to match the tools you're using.

So, if you initially run bibtex <filename> to produce a .bbl and then try to recompile the document with a \usepackage{biblatex} line, Biblatex will find that the .bbl has the 'wrong' format. This can happen because you explicitly run bibtex or it can happen because your editor is configured to run bibtex automatically whenever you compile a document.

Whatever the cause, Biblatex will find that the .bbl format is the old-style format which looks like code for your bibliography, rather than the new-style format which doesn't and which Biblatex expects.

Hence, Biblatex will give you an error because it is faced with a .bbl which it knows is designed for a different bibliographic tool-set.

The point is that Biblatex will not overwrite or remove a file which you might not want it to, because that might be pretty bad. Instead, it tells you about the problem so that you can decide what to do.

What you typically want to do is to simply delete the .bbl file, recompile the document and run biber to generate a .bbl with the correct format. Then, when you recompile again, Biblatex will find a .bbl in the format it expects.