General ⇒ Referencing not working - probably very easy but I'm lost

[timbob04]

Okay, I've made some progress.

Basically two things were happening. For some reason apacite is not working no matter what I do. Also, some of the examples I sent did have the references file as .tex, not .bib files. I apologize for the second thing. This was stupid by me and probably caused by panic at my thesis not working.

I have now got the MWE to work with natbib but apacite does not work no matter what I do. With time running out with my thesis, I have actually thought it easier to just change from apacite to natbib. I've had to change all of my citation commands (e.g. \shortcite to \citep), and yes this was painful in a 250 page thesis , but I'm back on track .

Another error I noticed was some references were corrupt in my thesis references file. I have managed to find all of these (about 10 in about 500). Also, some of the functions in the text automatically changed to what they were trying to print (e.g $/pm$ change to the actual +- sign). Both of these things were completely fine on my original computer so I'm not sure what went wrong. Again I have painfully now found all of these issues so back on track.

Regarding this last point, do you know of any good sources explaining how to safely transfer over latex documents? I had my whole thesis in one main directory (with many sub-directories), which was all copied over, but maybe I missed something in another file. For example, are there any settings MiKTeX or Texmaker uses to configure previous settings or configurations on a new computer (with new MiKTeX and Texmaker downloads), which I maybe forgot to copy over?

In summary, i) I made some mistakes in the MWE I sent you (apologies for this), ii) some of my thesis files seemed to be corrupt or missing or something but I have painfully fixed all these small errors, using natbib (instead of apacite) and some very very thorough error reading.

Thank you both once again for all the help.

Tim

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Hi Tim,

great that it works now!

For transferring LaTeX documents, I would just copy the whole document folder with subdirectories. Editor settings are not important and unrelated to the content, even MiKTeX settings should not be needed when transferring. The other computer may have another MiKTeX version, or even TeX Live, and other editor versions.

LaTeX is designed so that documents work on several platforms in the same way. There can be file properties such as character encoding that differs between operating systems. But if you use Windows again, the encoding is the same. The only significant point when switching to another TeX installation is that there can be a different TeX engine version, a different LaTeX format version, or different package versions. However, TeX and LaTeX are designed to be backwards compatible. That's not the case for all of the thousands of LaTeX packages, but most of the time it's ok. And if there's an issue, it usually can be fixed.

Good luck with your thesis! Let us know if any other issue happens.

Stefan