Problems with backslashes

phuquocvn

When I put the name of some author as G\"{u}nter and export to Bibtex, the backslash is replaced by \textbackslash, which is not desirable. Is there any way to fix this?

Thanks!

dstillman

You're putting G\"{u}nter in the Zotero field? Don't do that. Zotero isn't a BibTeX-specific tool. Put data in Zotero fields as is. If you want escaped characters in BibTeX output, change the export charset.

phuquocvn

This is rather strange. In terms of implementation, it should be easier to leave things as they are instead of changing \ to \textbackslash.

If there is no way to fix this in Zotero, do I have to set up LaTeX so that it will recognize UTF8?

Thanks!

adamsmith

It actually is desirable. Zotero expects you to enter fields as you want them and not in TeX. So if Zotero sees a backslash it figures you actually want one there and thus exports it as \textbackslash to bibtex. Just writing the regular u with dots in Zotero and setting the character encoding right (I believe to ISO? but someone has to help me out here) will export this to \"{u} with bibtex export. There are a bunch of threads on this on the forum if you search.

phuquocvn

I see what you mean. I tried all the westerns and isos, none of them seems to work :-(.

Thanks!

phuquocvn

Anyone, plz help! Any Zotero developer? Thanks.

phuquocvn

I see how to fix it: choose UTF-8 without BOM.

This is probably something that was overlooked by the developing team, since UTF-8 and UTF-8 without BOM should only have one difference: the BOM (byte ordering marker). I hope some developer will see this post and fix the UTF-8 option. Thanks!

Anne Warlaumont

Thanks so much, phuquocvn! I was looking for a solution to the same problem and that worked perfectly for me too.

sfried123

Just to let people from the internet who land her know: 10+ years later, this problem still persists: You have to choose "UTF-8 without BOM" if you want to get the correct formatting for you Bibtex enty.

(The name "UTF-8 without BOM" should really be changed to something that indicates that this is what people want to select when exporting to Bibtex, since this is probably a very frequent use-case.)

adamsmith

The correct charset to select if you want escaped characters in BibTeX is "Western" and that's working for me (and, I suspect others: we'd get more reports otherwise).

If you're certain that this is not working for you and UTF-8 without BOM is (it shouldn't), provide a debug output ID for an export with that setting.
https://www.zotero.org/support/debug_output#zotero

dstillman

Yeah that's just a bug, obviously, as @phuquocvn pointed out a decade ago. I've fixed that — your Zotero should have the fix within a few minutes.

If you want TeX escape sequences, use Western (which has certainly worked for many years).

dstillman

(I think we'll also remove the "without BOM" option, which doesn't actually do anything.)