Migrate to biblatex

[tomasff]

Use biblatex instead of natbib

[mbg]

Hi @tomasff, thanks for opening this PR and sorry I haven't looked at it sooner. I tried building this locally, but the citations don't seem to render properly:

Is there any particular way that you are building this and, if so, could you document what is needed to make this work?

I have updated the CI so that it should now also run for pull requests. Could you rebase your branch on master?

[tomasff]

Hi @mbg, no problem!

I had set the referencing style to draft, which is intended when working on a draft of the document so I thought it would be suitable, but there are other styles supported by default see examples: Biblatex Cheat Sheet and Overleaf.

Using textcite which seems more appropriate here with the authoryear style results in something similar to what was configured with natbib before.

Should I make these changes and reference the cheat sheet (& maybe the overleaf examples) in the readme?

[mbg]

I would ideally like to keep the styles as they are. The switch to biblatex should not change the look of the resulting PDFs. In your screenshots, the citation looks OK -- at least for a single author citation. It would be useful to check citations with multiple authors, "et al", and the equivalent of \citep as well.

The second screenshot shows a very different formatting from the one that's currently in use. It would be good to configure it so that it matches the current style.

[mbg]

@tomasff are you still working on / planning to work on this?

[tomasff]

Hey @mbg, I wanted to try to convert the plainnat.bst to a .bbx/.cbx/.lbx, but unfortunately, I don't have experience doing that. However, I found this which seems to be a slightly modified version of plainnat for biblatex which could provide very similar result to the current style used.

I'll try this and post some screenshots.