Your document contains nothing referenciable. Try adding a label or bibliography

Questions
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1

Dear Typst community,

First off. Thank you for building Typst. It is an amazing tool :heart_hands:

I’ve started my Typst experience with a template I found, and everything is working smoothly, except citations from a bibliography file.

I followed the instructions in the documentation:

  1. Created a references.bib file with BibTeX entries.
  2. Added #bibliography("references.bib") at the end of the document.
  3. Attempted to cite entries with the @Foo1998 syntax.

For some reason, labels from the references.bib file are not recognized. When I attempt to press the @ in the menu bar, it shows the message in the title of this thread:

Your document contains nothing referenciable. Try adding a label or bibliography.

I searched online, and in this forum, and couldn’t find an answer to this issue. Could someone please help?

2

That’s strange, seems like it doesn’t “see” the bibliography. It could be related to some show-rules in template or the bibtex file, it is hard to tell from what you said.

Could you share the project or create some minimial example with the error? That would make it much easier to find out what’s wrong.

3

Hi @juliohm , can you share an example of your references.bib and your main.txt file?
I suspect that the reference file is not written correctly.
For example, the following code works:

main.typ:

// default text of the bubble template and the following lines

#lorem(25)
#bibliography("references.bib")

references.bib:

@article{Foo1998,
  author = {John Foo},
  title = {Something Interesting},
  year = {1998},
  journal = {Journal of Test Data}
}
4

@Rifling the references.bib file has the following content:

@article{Krumbein1967,
  title={FORTRAN IV Computer Programs for Markov Chain Experiments in Geology},
  author={W.C. Krumbein},
  journal={Bulletin (Kansas Geological Survey)},
  year={1967},
  url={https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:276237192}
}

@article{Carle1996,
  doi = {10.1007/bf02083656},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02083656},
  year = {1996},
  month = may,
  publisher = {Springer Science and Business Media {LLC}},
  volume = {28},
  number = {4},
  pages = {453--476},
  author = {Steven F. Carle and Graham E. Fogg},
  title = {Transition probability-based indicator geostatistics},
  journal = {Mathematical Geology}
}

Do you see any problem with it?

5

Your references.bib looks fine and I have just tested it with the bubble template you used and it works fine for me. Anything else you changed for the template?

6

I believe this was a glitch in the Typst app somehow. I restarted it and it now works as expected. Sorry for the noise.

7

Yes @juliohm , sometimes the web application may have latencies.
I suggest you take a look at the VSCode Tinymist extension, for writing locally.