bibtex export and pages

brianjd

Zotero records all journal articles I've come across as startpage-endpage, e.g., 73-93. But an export of this item to Bibtex would give

pages = {73-93}

which compiles to something funky like "73093". What I need is for Zotero to export 73-93 so that I get

pages = {73--93}

in Bibtex which compiles to the desired "73-93".

Why is this going on? Am I missing something here? Is there some simple preference I can tweak so that pages exports to Bibtex correctly?

noksagt

Are you sure they are using the hyphen '-' and not some other UTF-8 entity (such as the endash, '–')? Zotero translates '-' to '--' on BibTeX export. However, it does not translate other punctuation to '--' if you are exporting as UTF-8.

brianjd

So they hyphen must be recorded for entries like this:

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/rest.89.4.701

because it exports to Bibtex in the desired "--" form.

However, entries imported from Google Scholar apparently are NOT getting the hypen. All my entries imported to Zotero from Google Scholar are being exported to Bibtex in the "-" form

fbennett

At what level of processing (import, storage, fetch, export/CSL processing) should cruft like this be sanitized?

adamsmith

import, ideally, no?

fbennett

Sounds right to me. Could maybe be slotted in somewhere between lines 1281 and 1738 of translate.js.

noksagt

However, entries imported from Google Scholar apparently are NOT getting the hypen. All my entries imported to Zotero from Google Scholar are being exported to Bibtex in the "-" form

Or, more accurately, in the '–' form (an en dash, not hyphen, as I posted earlier). Change your export character set to ISO-8859-1 & this will get transliterated to the LaTeX entity {\textendash}.

fbennett

@noksagt: but these characters should ideally be normalized in the data for this field, yes?

noksagt

@noksagt: but these characters should ideally be normalized in the data for this field, yes?

Sure. I was attempting to help briandj with his immediate issue (and he may have many other problems exporting to UTF-8 BibTeX when his toolchain does not support it). My posting of this fix was not meant to cast any judgment on suggested improvements to Zotero.

brianjd

Yup, this works. Thank you very much noksagt!