Rename File from Parent Metadata

igm2103

Hi,

I'm having troubles using Zotero integration in Mendeley. The issue appears because I have used the Zotero "Rename file from parent metadata" function, and some filenames ended up with some French and German diacritics. Those files that have diacritics in their filename are not recognized by Mendeley.

So, my question is: is there a way of automatically renaming the files without using any special characters in the filename?

adamsmith

no, not currently. I thought we did that by default, but that's not the case. (That said, though, while it's probably not desirable, using diacritics in file names isn't illegal. This is a Mendeley bug)

adamsmith

I looked around some - basically Zotero devs are saying that all contemporary file systems (i.e. Windows since XP, Mac OS X, linux) do support UTF-8 filenames, so there is no reason to remove diacritics in filenames, since that also constitute a loss of information.
Adding an option for different filename encoding would only be reasonable if there was a legitimate use case and I don't think "software xyz is buggy" counts as such.

sbyrnes321

I'm using Ubuntu 12.04 (Linux). I just checked my filesystem locale: I typed "locale" in a terminal and everything was set to en_US.UTF-8. So there shouldn't be a problem, right?

Yet when I add something to the bibliography, and it auto-downloads the PDF and renames from parent metadata, zotero cannot read the file that it just wrote! (When there are diacritics.) The file is there, but Linux flags it "invalid encoding". Zotero thinks the file that it just saved is missing ("attached file could not be found")

So something is definitely wrong with Zotero. Even though unicode file names should be fine, zotero is somehow naming files incorrectly when there are diacritics.

adamsmith

odd. Which diacritics? I just tried with é and ü on an otherwise equivalent Ubuntu 12.10 system without any issues.

sbyrnes321

Whoops, please ignore what I said above. Actually the file names with diacritics somehow got corrupted when I copied the zotero folder from my old Windows Vista computer to my new Ubuntu computer. Not sure what I did wrong when I transferred the files (via external hard drive), but anyway it's not Zotero's fault.

antikorpo

Zotfile has an option to suppress diacritics, but i'm not sure if that's only true for newly added files (through the import folder).

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I would like to add that it would be great if the old filename (which is sometimes unique) could be put into the note on that file (when you select a file you can directly write on the right). Like that it would be searchable by that old filename.

As an example: my professor gave me a file called "PenzelDigital.pdf" and it would be renamed as "Penzel et al. - 2007 - Digital analysis and technical specifications.pdf". If i have a lot of files from Penzel which contain "digital" somwhere in the title, i would still be able to search for "PenzelDigital" as one word to get the right file.

Another example: if i download a file from a journal, they sometimes have weird numbers in their name. To check whether i already have that file, i could then just search for that filename.