.bib file not used

[bstaton1]

I continue to be impressed by and enjoy using this package!

I'm trying to use this to preview how citations will appear in latex output:

texPreview::tex_preview(tex_lines = readLines("natbib_sample.tex"))

Where natbib_sample.tex is taken directly from the MWE here and looks like:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

\usepackage[square,numbers]{natbib}
\bibliographystyle{abbrvnat}

\title{Bibliography management: \texttt{natbib} package}
\author{Share\LaTeX}
\date { }

\begin{document}

\maketitle

This document is an example of \texttt{natbib} package using in bibliography 
management. Three items are cited: \textit{The \LaTeX\ Companion} book \cite{latexcompanion}, the Einstein journal paper \citet{einstein}, and the 
Donald Knuth's website \cite{knuthwebsite}. The \LaTeX\ related items are
\cite{latexcompanion,knuthwebsite}. 

\medskip
 
\bibliography{sample}
 
\end{document}

In the same directory, I also have the sample.bib file:

@article{einstein,
  author =       "Albert Einstein",
  title =        "{Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter K{\"o}rper}. ({German})
        [{On} the electrodynamics of moving bodies]",
  journal =      "Annalen der Physik",
  volume =       "322",
  number =       "10",
  pages =        "891--921",
  year =         "1905",
  DOI =          "http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/andp.19053221004"
}

@book{latexcompanion,
  author    = "Michel Goossens and Frank Mittelbach and Alexander Samarin",
  title     = "The \LaTeX\ Companion",
  year      = "1993",
  publisher = "Addison-Wesley",
  address   = "Reading, Massachusetts"
}

@misc{knuthwebsite,
  author    = "Donald Knuth",
  title     = "Knuth: Computers and Typesetting",
  url       = "http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/\~{}uno/abcde.html"
}

When I run tex_preview() on natbib_sample.tex, the document renders but the citations are not found:

This error is displayed in the tex_tempDoc.log file
file as well.

I can render natbib_sample.tex just fine by opening it in RStudio and knitting it (expected.pdf).

Any ideas? Thanks!

[yonicd]

That is great that you are exploring the package. Thank you for the feedback.

Unfortunately bib would be beyond the scope of the package since internally only pdflatex is called.

To render the bib file a sequence of calls would be needed to be invoked

pdflatex DOCNAME.tex
bibtex DOCNAME.aux
pdflatex DOCNAME.tex
pdflatex DOCNAME.tex

Where DOCNAME is the name of the parent tex file.

[bstaton1]

Thank you for your response. I understand the reason why this doesn't work now!

I don't suppose there would be any interest in including a bibtex = TRUE argument to tex_preview()? I don't know much about the guts of this package and how much it would involve to do such a thing, and it may not be worth it if I'm the only one interested, but I thought I would float the idea anyways.

[yonicd]

Thank you for the suggestion.

We haven't had any requests for this thus far.

I think that usually users use Rmarkdown output:pdf_document to compile such things since it does already support bib files.

If there are some repeated requests for this we would surely look into adding such a feature.

Thanks again for trying out the package.

Closing for now.