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I have a voluminous book with the following bibliography setup:

\usepackage[backend=bibtex, bibstyle=authoryear, 
            citestyle=authoryear-icomp, natbib=true,
            ibidpage=true]{biblatex}

As far as I can tell, packages like authorindex or makeidx won't work with this, right?

Unfortunately, I can't change much on this set-up. I need natbib formatting, and bibtex broke in this document a few years ago, and I could never find out what the problem was.

Mico
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Robert Mitchell
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    On the biblatex side of things, natbib=true within biblatex shouldn't be interfering with anything, relying on backend=bibtex rather than using biber could be an issue though. Does this answer help? – Dai Bowen Aug 19 '23 at 16:15
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    Welcome to TeX.SE. – Mico Aug 19 '23 at 16:15
  • Thanks. I can change to biber, but authorindex requires bibtex right? I'm making a keyword index as well via makeidx. – Robert Mitchell Aug 19 '23 at 16:42
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    I'm afraid I don't actually know authorindex, but reading moewe's answer here it doesn't sound like it's needed and biblatex (at least with biber) can do the job by itself? This is kind of the default situation with biblatex: it's incompatible with similar packages but it can reproduce their functionality. – Dai Bowen Aug 19 '23 at 20:20
  • Alternatively it seems like the natbib package itself can work with authorindex according to this answer, and depending what you mean by natbib formatting (I don't think natbib=true in biblatex does much more than define \citet and other variants of \cite) there may be other options. – Dai Bowen Aug 19 '23 at 20:22
  • Would take someone more qualified to say if biblatex and authorindex are fundamentally incompatible, but happy to look into a full non-working but compilable example if you can provide. – Dai Bowen Aug 19 '23 at 20:24
  • Thanks, I tried that solution by Moewe, but it didn't work. Neither did putting in a natbib.cfg file, as would work with natbib proper. I have found a brute force method: us the authorindex command \aionly after, e.g., \citep{author:year}. Then authorindex finds it. I may just go through the book and do this, since I'm using makeidx for an index of keywords. – Robert Mitchell Aug 20 '23 at 12:18
  • Basically, this shows me that, even though in the .aux file there is only the command \citation, authorindex can't see it unless I use the explicit commands of authorindex. If this weren't a document that has several years of work in it, I'd change stuff around, but unless there's a more elegant method I'll search my way through the document and add an \aionly behind citations. – Robert Mitchell Aug 20 '23 at 12:32
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    bibstyle=authoryear, citestyle=authoryear-icomp, is equivalent to the shorter style=authoryear-icomp,. Nowadays there is rarely a reason to stick with backend=bibtex, instead of backend=biber, (of course you may have to adjust your editor settings for Biber: https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/154751/35864). Only Biber offers full support of all biblatex features. And for authorindex the real obstacle is that you use biblatex. Whether you use BIbTeX or BibTeX with biblatex is pretty much irrelevant for authorindex (it won't work out of the box either way). – moewe Aug 21 '23 at 06:33
  • Great, thanks for all the comments. I can get biber to work, but due to time constraints I may just take the brute force method with authorindex, as I can get my two indexes most easily that way. My next book will be with biber :))) – Robert Mitchell Aug 21 '23 at 12:35

1 Answers1

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authorindex isn't directly compatible with biblatex (and changing anything in natbib.cfg will not do anything for biblatex no matter if the natbib compatibility mode is used: the natbib compatibility mode essentially only enables natbib names of some cite commands, see Is there a disadvantage to using natbib=true with biblatex?).

But as mentioned in the comments by Dai Bowen and demonstrated in How to create an author index using BibLaTeX with Biber backend and APA style and the example documents linked there, biblatex has indexing support out of the box, so there should be no need for authorindex.

If you want indexing in a document using biblatex I strongly suggest you look into biblatex's built-in capabilities instead of external packages for cite indexing. How to create an author index using BibLaTeX with Biber backend and APA style and the example documents linked there can be a start, but if your document setup is already more complicated when it comes to citations, the bibliography or indexing and you cannot manage to get anything going based on the link, I suggest you ask a new question with a compilable example document and a clear description of what you want to achieve.

moewe
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