Confused result of changing the bst-file for bibliography in Russian

Question

The present question is the continuation of the previous discussion (See here).

I've tried to change BiBTeX style for needed purpose by two ways: using custom-bib and by modification of plainnat.bst file (thanks to Mico's suggestion). Both times I got the same result:

That is, initials before points were lost. I'm sure, that the issue is caused by necessity to use specified options for precessing BiBTeX-file in Russian. Can anybody help me?

Answer 1

I don't think the missing-characters business you're encountering is related to BibTeX, at least not directly. I downloaded the files you posted off-site and have had a look. I'm very sorry my Russian -- and even my ability to read text that uses Cyrillic letters -- isn't all that good. The following is therefore mainly going to be a set of suggestions, which you may want to treat as no more than a starting point for further investigations.

• Since your files are utf8-encoded, I strongly recommend you use a TeX engine that's fully utf8-enabled. I suggest you use LuaLaTeX. (I assume you've been using pdfLaTeX so far. Is that correct?) If you choose this route, you should comment out (or simply delete) the instructions \usepackage[T2A]{fontenc} and \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} from the preamble of the main tex file. In their place, (a) insert the instruction \usepackage{fontspec} and (b) choose a font (via a \setmainfont instruction) that's on your system and has excellent support for Cyrillic characters. On my system (MacOSX 10.11.6; MacTeX2016), I found "Garamond Premier Pro"; I thus wrote \setmainfont{Garamond Premier Pro} in the preamble. I trust you'll have several good fonts to choose from on your system.

• Run LuaLaTeX once.

• Next, instead of running "basic" BibTeX, which can probably handle only ASCII-encoded material without generating meaningless error messages, consider running bibtexu, which is utf8-enabled. You will probably need to open a command window, switch to the directory that contains your main tex file (SampleFile.tex, say), and type

  bibtexu SampleFile
  

  Ignore any cryptic error messages.

• Then, run LuaLaTeX twice more to generate both the formatted bibliography and citation call-outs.

I get the following output from this exercise; is this roughly what it should look like?

\documentclass{article}
% I've shrunk your tex file down to the absolute minimum...
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont{Garamond Premier Pro} 
\usepackage[russian]{babel}
\usepackage[square,numbers,sort&compress]{natbib}
\bibliographystyle{plainnat-re}
\begin{document}
Citations: \citep{Ajn1962, AbrAru1963, Bab1984, AlbN1972}
\bibliography{sample_bib}
\end{document}