It was all going rather well, actually - until I discovered that pandoc doesn't support regular bibliographies / references. Upon discovering this, I ended up with a bit of problem. Thankfully, the answer lay in pdflatex - but getting to the point where I could use it without having it crash on me (which, by the way it can't accomplish properly - it gives an exit code of 0 when crashing! O.o) was not a trivial journey.

This blog post is a follow up to my first post on rendering LaTeX documents with pandoc, and is my attempt to document what I did to get it to work. To start with, I installed texlive properly. Here's how to do that on apt-based systems:

sudo apt install texlive-latex-extra --no-install-recommends

The no-install-recommends is useful here to avoid ~450MiB of useless documentation (in PDF form, apparently) being dumped to your hard drive. I've also got an arch-based system (it's actually Artix Linux, that I've blogged about) which I've done this on, so here's the install command for those kind of systems:

sudo pacman -S texlive-latexextra

Once that's installed, we can use it to render our LaTeX document to PDF. Upon discussing my issues with my Lecturer at University, I discovered that you actually have to run 3 commands in succession in order to render a single PDF. Here they are:

bibtex filename
pdflatex --output-directory=. filename.tex
pdflatex --output-directory=. filename.tex

The first one compiles the bibliography using BiBTeX. If it isn't installed already, you might need to search your distribution's repositories and install it. Next, we run the LaTeX file through pdflatex from TeXLive not once but twice - as it apparently needs to resolve the references on the first pass (why it can't do them all in once pass I have no idea :P).

It's also worth noting that the bibtex command doesn't like you to append the filename extension - it does it automatically, apparently.

That's about everything I've got on the process so far. If you've got anything else to add, please let me know in the comments below (I'm rather new to this whole LaTeX thing....)

Further Reading

• TeX FAQ for University Students