R Sweave will not create a .bbl file on Linux Ubuntu

[bretauv]

I revive the message of gentryae (natbib error (no .bbl file created)) because I have a similar problem but on Ubuntu 18.04.2 and not on MacOS : R Sweave does not create automatically the .bbl file necessary to detect citations in the text. I found a solution with compiling in another program (Impossible to cite with biblatex in R Sweave) but it would much more convenient not to compile three times the same file (on two different softwares).

One of the comments here (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/55682811/rstudio-will-not-write-a-bbl-file-when-compiling-rnw-file-with-citations-in-na) mentioned the fact that maybe R Sweave does not run bibtex. Is there something to do to fix this problem ?

(I have already asked this a few weeks ago but since answers are not allowed anymore, I refresh it)

[jcblum]

Hi @bretauv!

Sorry to hear about the trouble you're having. There has been at lest one other Sweave/bibtex-related thread here recently:

R Sweave Bibtex Citations

I am writing and have been writing several documents using Sweave. In the past, I have been able to create a .bib file and cite using the natbib package with apa styling. Since updating (to enjoy the lovely jobs feature) I can not compile my old .rnw files that used to work. I've spent hours searching (like this person) around and the only solution that has worked is to open the .tex file that is generated and compile there (this works flawlessly in both cases below). However, using two programs is less than ideal and I'd like to get RStudio to build the pdf directly. There was some discussion online that perhaps RStudio is not running the BibTex command to create the .bbl file. This seems…

Does anything in that person's experience help you out?

[bretauv]

actually, we've had a conversation on stackoverflow (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57136664/r-sweave-does-not-compile-bbl-file?noredirect=1#comment101721867_57136664) and his solution (uninstall miktex and install tinytex) does not work for me. Do you know why R does not run biber and if improvements are to come ?

[bretauv]

I finally got the solution, here's what I did :

• based on the comments of this person, I uninstalled MikTeX and the complete TeX distributions on my computer. Since I use Ubuntu, I used purge to remove MikTeX, TeXLive, tex-commons, etc.

• then, I installed (or re-installed) TinyTeX (details here)

• I installed manually the packages I needed with tlmgr_install(). Normally, it can be done automatically but that's what I did.

• finally, I replaced biber by bibtex in \usepackage[backend = biber]{biblatex} (this person explains why it is important)

This last step made it work, but I don't know if the previous ones are important or not. Since he succeeded in compiling the bibliography too, I suppose it is necessary but there's no way for me to prove it.

Anyway, now, when I compile the Sweave document, the bibliography is directly created. Thanks a lot to this person for his/her ideas.

Edit : I re-installed MikTeX after all of this and it works too.