How can I get Arabic characters just in my references in Rmarkdown?

Question

I have one reference in Arabic that shows blank squares instead of the Arabic characters.

This is my YAML

---
title: "A fancy project"
author: "A reliable human being"
output:
  bookdown::pdf_document2:
    latex_engine: lualatex           
    keep_tex: yes                   #keep the latex format
header-includes:
  - \usepackage[arabic, english]{babel}
  - \usepackage{fontspec}
  - \setmainfont{Garamond}
date: "2022-09-16"
bibliography: references.bib
csl: apa.csl
---

My reference is this one:

@article{al2020الخصائص,
  title={الخصائص السيكو مترية للصورة العربية للإصدار الثاني من قائمة الخمسة الكبار},
  author={Al-Ansari, Bader M and Alali, Talal B},
  journal={BAU Journal-Society, Culture and Human Behavior},
  volume={1},
  number={2},
  pages={3},
  year={2020}
}

This is my session info:

R version 4.2.1 (2022-06-23 ucrt)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
Running under: Windows 10 x64 (build 22622)

Matrix products: default

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_United States.utf8 
[2] LC_CTYPE=English_United States.utf8   
[3] LC_MONETARY=English_United States.utf8
[4] LC_NUMERIC=C                          
[5] LC_TIME=English_United States.utf8    

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

other attached packages:
[1] kableExtra_1.3.4 dplyr_1.0.10    

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] pillar_1.8.1      compiler_4.2.1    tools_4.2.1       digest_0.6.29    
 [5] viridisLite_0.4.1 evaluate_0.16     lifecycle_1.0.2   tibble_3.1.8     
 [9] pkgconfig_2.0.3   rlang_1.0.6       cli_3.4.1         DBI_1.1.3        
[13] rstudioapi_0.14   yaml_2.3.5        xfun_0.33         fastmap_1.1.0    
[17] stringr_1.4.1     httr_1.4.4        knitr_1.40        xml2_1.3.3       
[21] systemfonts_1.0.4 generics_0.1.3    vctrs_0.4.1       webshot_0.5.3    
[25] tidyselect_1.1.2  svglite_2.1.0     glue_1.6.2        R6_2.5.1         
[29] fansi_1.0.3       rmarkdown_2.16    bookdown_0.29     purrr_0.3.4      
[33] magrittr_2.0.3    scales_1.2.1      htmltools_0.5.3   assertthat_0.2.1 
[37] rvest_1.0.3       colorspace_2.0-3  utf8_1.2.2        stringi_1.7.8    
[41] munsell_0.5.0 

I have tried the solutions proposed here and here, but to no avail. They apply if Arabic characters are wanted within the text, so solutions like marking the text that you want in Arabic are not an option.

I think you have everything you need to reproduce it yourself.

Answer 1

One way you could show arab-text in bibliography by wrapping that arab text with \txarb from the arabluatex package and using biblatex as citation pacakge.

---

---
title: "A fancy project"
author: "A reliable human being"
output:
  pdf_document:
    latex_engine: lualatex  
    citation_package: biblatex         
    keep_tex: yes
header-includes:
  - \usepackage{arabluatex}
  - \usepackage{fontspec}
  - \newfontfamily\arabicfont[Script=Arabic]{Lateef}
date: "2022-09-16"
bibliography: references.bib
csl: apa.csl
biblatexoptions:
  - citestyle = authoryear
  - bibstyle = authoryear
---

```{r setup, include=FALSE}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo = TRUE)
```

# Rmarkdown

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet [@al2020الخصائص] consectetur.


# Reference

references.bib

@article{al2020الخصائص,
  title={\txarb{الخصائص السيكو مترية للصورة العربية للإصدار الثاني من قائمة الخمسة الكبار}},
  author={Al-Ansari, Bader M and Alali, Talal B},
  journal={BAU Journal-Society, Culture and Human Behavior},
  volume={1},
  number={2},
  pages={3},
  year={2020}
}

---

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