0

I am trying to compile a document of class article. There are Cyrillic letters in some references I would like to cite as there is not English translation for the title or journal name of some of my sources. I have compiled a minimal example which in my case throws the error: Font T2A/cmr/m/n/12=larm1200 at 12.0pt not loadable: Metric (TFM) file not found. \babel@aux{russian}{}

I run TexLive 2023 with TexStudio 4.6.3 on Linux Mint.

% !TeX spellcheck = en_US
\documentclass[12pt,a4paper]{article}
\usepackage[a4paper,left=2.6cm, right=2.9cm, top=3.5cm, bottom=3.5cm]{geometry}
\usepackage[T2A,T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[english,russian]{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}
\usepackage[style = ext-authoryear, giveninits=true, uniquename = init, isbn = false, url = false, eprint = false, doi = false, dashed = false, uniquelist = minyear, maxcitenames = 2, minbibnames = 7, maxbibnames = 8, backend = biber]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{ref.bib}

\begin{document}
This is some text and I cite stuff \parencite{Tsvelev1981}.
\printbibliography
\end{document}

In my file ref.bib it says:

@Article{Tsvelev1981,
  author       = {Tsvelev},
  journaltitle = {Бюллетень Московского общества испытателей природы (Bulletin of the Moscow Society of Natural Scientists)},
  title        = {Veronicas (\textit{Veronica} \textsc{L.}) of the affinity of \textit{Veronica spicata} \textsc{L.} and some problems of the phylogenesis of the genus},
  year         = {1981},
  number       = {6},
  pages        = {82-92},
  volume       = {86},
}

I believe there are some similar questions out there. As far as I have seem most people try to use a mix of Cyrillic and Latin alphabets in their actual text and do not import mixed entries with their bibliography. I am not sure whether this makes a difference. This post suggests installing texlive-fonts-recommended may be a fix. I have this package installed. This post asks to mark up the bibliography entries but used natbib. I have tried:

@Article{Tsvelev1981,
  author       = {Tsvelev},
  journaltitle = {\foreignlanguage{russian}{Бюллетень Московского общества испытателей природы} (Bulletin of the Moscow Society of Natural Scientists)},
  title        = {Veronicas (\textit{Veronica} \textsc{L.}) of the affinity of \textit{Veronica spicata} \textsc{L.} and some problems of the phylogenesis of the genus},
  year         = {1981},
  number       = {6},
  pages        = {82-92},
  volume       = {86},
}

However, this does not solve my problem. Is the \foreignlanguage command the way to go? Is there another package I need to install? I am stumped.

Mareike
  • 105
  • If it's just about the missing fonts (I can't test because biblatex fails) you might just need tlmgr install collection-langcyrillic. However, not also that much as the last encoding declared in fontenc is the default one, also the last language given to babel is the default one. With your current setup russian is the main language. – campa Oct 24 '23 at 13:02
  • Hello, collection-langcyrillic is already installed. Changing the order of babel' and fontenc (\usepackage[T2A,T1]{fontenc} and \usepackage[russian,english]{babel}) arguments yields a different error message: Command \CYRB unavailable in encoding T1. Which I think means, LaTex is trying to apply the T1 encoding to the Cyrillic letters. – Mareike Oct 24 '23 at 15:24
  • You've requested russian as the default language for babel. Generally better to pass language options to your class, too. – cfr Oct 24 '23 at 23:28

1 Answers1

1

Using modern OpenType/TrueType (OTF/TTF) Unicode fonts, instead of legacy fonts/encodings, makes things easier.

For example, Noto Serif has both Latin and Cyrillic in it.

example

Note that Biblatex/Biber can understand and apply polyglossia/babel language settings for an entry via the langid= field in the bibentry.

Note also that translations and comments can be stored as annotations in the bibentry (or in external files if there are many of them).

MWE

\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@Article{Tsvelev1981,
  author       = {Tsvelev},
  journaltitle = {Бюллетень Московского общества испытателей природы (Bulletin of the Moscow Society of Natural Scientists)},
  title        = {Veronicas (\textit{Veronica} \textsc{L.}) of the affinity of \textit{Veronica spicata} \textsc{L.} and some problems of the phylogenesis of the genus},
  date         = {1981},
  number       = {6},
  pages        = {82-92},
  volume       = {86},
}
\end{filecontents}

\documentclass[12pt,a4paper]{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont{Noto Serif}
\usepackage[a4paper,left=2.6cm, right=2.9cm, top=3.5cm, bottom=3.5cm]{geometry}
%\usepackage[T2A,T1]{fontenc}
%\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[russian,english]{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}
\usepackage[style = ext-authoryear, giveninits=true, uniquename = init, isbn = false, url = false, eprint = false, doi = false, dashed = false, uniquelist = minyear, maxcitenames = 2, minbibnames = 7, maxbibnames = 8, backend = biber]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}


\begin{document}
This is some text and I cite stuff \parencite{Tsvelev1981}.
\printbibliography
\end{document}
Cicada
  • 10,129