BRG blog

TeXlipse and Biblatex

Posted on April 14th, 2015, by tom in Code, Tools

Biblatex is a package for LateX that provides more control over the way references are managed. A quick introduction can be found here, and more detailed information here. Using the package with all the default values works great, but then you are not really making the most of it. Once you start changing options, there is one important thing you should know…

This is a basic usage example:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{biblatex}
\addbibresource{refs.bib}

\begin{document}

\title{Title}
\author{Van Mele, T.}
\maketitle

\section{Introduction}

This is the first paragraph \cite{xxx}.

\printbibliography

\end{document}

If you have an entry in refs.bib with key xxx, this should work without a problem.

@article{xxx,
    author  = "Van Mele, T.",
    title   = "xxx",
    journal = "xxx",
    year    = "2015",
    volume  = "",
    number  = "",
    pages   = "",
    month   = "",
    doi     = "",
    note    = "",
}

The default backend for biblatex (at least in TeXlipse) is bibtex. To switch to biber, this will not work:

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

Apparently, if backend is the first option it does not get processed properly. TeXlipse will complain the bibliography file is empty, and the references section will not be displayed. Adding a few options in before backend will already do the trick. However, even if it is the only option, there is a simple solution:

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

One Response to “TeXlipse and Biblatex”

1. happycoder says: December 1, 2015 at 7:01 pm

   Thanks for this post.
   It helped me a lot.