Introduction
For publishing articles with Lyx I’ve used Zotero, JabRef and Lyx during my PhD. I’ve always had problems with the encoding of the BibTex files and ended up editing them in JabRef, removing/replacing strange characters.
Today my beloved girlfriend (are you happy now?) indicated me BibLatex. She showed me that we can configure Lyx to use it through biber.
This is a list of steps that you should perform to be able to use BibLatex on Lyx.
Step 1: Reconfigure encodings in Zotero and JabRef
Setup Zotero to export to UTF-8.
Setup JabRef to use the default encoding as UTF-8.
Step 2: Install biblatex and biber
In Ubuntu I installed the packages: biblatex texlive-latex-extra texlive-bibtex-extra
Step 3: Create the biblatex.module file
Create a file named biblatex.module with the following content:
#\DeclareLyXModule{Biblatex-citation-styles}
#DescriptionBegin
#A prerequisite for using the biblatex package. This module
#enables the author/year citation styles without actually loading natbib.
#Biblatex itself needs to be loaded manually. Cf.
#http://wiki.lyx.org/BibTeX/Biblatex
#DescriptionEnd
Format 11
# this is biblatex actually
Provides natbib 1
Put the file biblatex.module in the layouts folder in your user directory (Help→About LyX tells you where you can find this directory; in the latest versions of OSX the correct layouts folder is in the applications folder).
In Ubuntu: ~/.lyx
Run Tools→Reconfigure, restart LyX.
Step 4: Creating the .lyx file
Add the biblatex module
Add to “Selected” the module “Biblatex-citation-styles” from Document→Settings→Modules.
Load biblatex in the preamble
In the document preamble (Document→Settings→Preamble) you have to load biblatex manually, with:
\usepackage[natbib=true,style=numeric,backend=biber,maxnames=1, doi=true, url=false,bibencoding=utf8]{biblatex}
Load the bibliography in the preamble
Load your bibliography database in the preamble:
\addbibresource{/home/alexandre/mybibs.bib}
You must load the databases must using \addbibresource commands.
Please refer to the biblatex documentation for further options.
Set biber as the BibTex processor
In Document→Settings→Bibliography, set the Processor as biber.
Load the bibliography in a note
In the document, insert the BibTeX inset (Insert→List/TOC→BibTeX Bibliography… ) in a LyX note or comment, such that LyX finds the citations, but no \bibliography command is output to LaTeX.
It does not matter which style you chose here, so you can stick with “plain”. To use the citation dialog, you’ll have to choose the correct databases (i.e. those you loaded above in item (3)).
You must do this if you are going to use the citation dialog. I use JabRef to push the citations instead.
Put the printbibliography command
In the document, enter \printbibliography in ERT (TeX mode) at the place where you want the bibliography to appear.
View the file in PDF
And this should do it.
References
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The biblatex.module file: http://wiki.lyx.org/uploads/BibTeX/biblatex.module
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The bibtexall script: http://wiki.lyx.org/uploads/BibTeX/bibtexall