Short citation and biblatex in tufte-class

Question

I am using the tufte-book class and want to have short citations, e.g. only first author, year, and maybe title, rather than a full cite every time I cite a reference. Various solutions suggest to use the [nobib] option to suppress natbib and then use biblatex. Unfortunately, [nobib] doesn't seem to do anything and I still get compatibility issues when using it with biblatex. One workaround would be to define my own citation command akin to

\sidenote{\citet{}}

This allows for short references in the margins, yet I still can't get biblatex to work. The solutions I found here didn't help.

Edit: That's the code that doesn't work.

\documentclass[nobib]{tufte-book} % Use the tufte-book class which in turn uses the tufte-common class
\usepackage[style=alphabetic,
            backend=bibtex8,        % or use biber or bibtex?
            bibencoding=latin1, % .bib file in latin1 or utf8 encoding?
            maxbibnames=99,         % give full list of authors (up to 99) in bibliography
            giveninits=true,        % use only initials for the first names
            url=false               % don't display urls
            ]{biblatex}
\bibliography{references}
\newcommand{\mycite}[1]{\sidenote{\citet{#1}}}
\begin{document}
\chapter{Control Theory}\label{ch:control_theory}
This chapter is concerned with control theory.
\section{Control Schemes}\label{sec:control_schemes}
Control barrier functions with \texttt{mycite}:\mycite{ames.2019a}.
Control barrier functions with \texttt{cite}:\cite{ames.2019a}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

The reference.bib:

@inproceedings{ames.2019a,
  title = {Control {{Barrier Functions}}: {{Theory}} and {{Applications}}},
  shorttitle = {Control {{Barrier Functions}}},
  booktitle = {2019 18th {{European Control Conference}} ({{ECC}})},
  author = {Ames, Aaron D. and Coogan, Samuel and Egerstedt, Magnus and Notomista, Gennaro and Sreenath, Koushil and Tabuada, Paulo},
  year = {2019},
  month = jun,
  pages = {3420--3431},
  doi = {10.23919/ECC.2019.8796030},
  abstract = {This paper provides an introduction and overview of recent work on control barrier functions and their use to verify and enforce safety properties in the context of (optimization based) safety-critical controllers. We survey the main technical results and discuss applications to several domains including robotic systems.},
}

The error is Package biblatex Error: Incompatible package 'natbib'.

The accepted answer to https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/45934/35864 works fine for me. Can you share a complete example document that shows what you are trying to do, please? Please also tell us how you compile your document. A document using biblatex will need to be compiled with LaTeX, Biber, LaTeX, LaTeX (https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/63852/35864 and https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/154751/35864). — moewe, Aug 16 '22 at 18:06
I use pdflatex and that already fails to compile due to the natbib incompatibility. — fukurai, Aug 16 '22 at 19:05
OK, it seems like I mixed up the tufte-common.def files and the one I had in my directory didn't had the nobib option yet. Using \renewcommand{\cite}[2][0pt]{\sidenote[][#1]{\fullcite{#2}}} from https://github.com/christopheradams/tufte-latex/issues/60 restored the previous behaviour. Now I've to figure how to shorten the fullcite to only author + year. — fukurai, Aug 16 '22 at 19:21

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 17 '22 at 15:46

Given that you managed to get biblatex up and running with tufte-book (a relatively recent version of the class should define the nobib option), I will only focus on the question of getting author-year citations.

That is done by switching the style from alphabetic to authoryear. If you want your citations in the sidenotes, use autocite=footnote,. Use the command \autocite to cite any entries.

\documentclass[nobib]{tufte-book}
\usepackage[
  backend=bibtex8,
  style=authoryear,
  maxbibnames=99,
  giveninits=true,
  url=false,
  autocite=footnote,
]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}
\begin{document}
\chapter{Control Theory}\label{ch:control_theory}
This chapter is concerned with control theory.
\section{Control Schemes}\label{sec:control_schemes}
Control barrier functions with \texttt{cite}: \autocite{sigfridsson}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

Short citation and biblatex in tufte-class

1 Answers1