bibtex page range not imported/exported correctly

George Politis · August 4, 2008

In bibtex, a page range is indicated by a double dash, e.g., 12--24. When I import, the double dash is replaced by a non-ascii em-dash character. This is only a cosmetic problem and arguably the right thing to do.

However, when I then export it back to bibtex, it preserves the non-ascii character. This is incorrect behaviour. It should output standard bibtex.

This is a problem as I need bibtex output to be compatible with other tools I need to use.

danep · October 5, 2009

I am also having this problem. It's very frustrating having to do a search-and-replace on every BibTex database that I export from Zotero. Is there any hope for resolution over a year later?

noksagt · October 5, 2009

A UTF-8 en dash is used if-and-only-if you export a UTF-8 bibtex file. If you export an ISO-8850-1 file, the en-dash will be replaced with "--". I'd argue that this is correct behavior. I do quibble with Zotero's default choice of UTF-8 export, but there is no bug here. Just change the character set you use for export.

danep · October 5, 2009

Thanks for the tip! It seems a little silly to export UTF-8 by default for BibTex when BibTex doesn't support UTF-8, but I'm clearly not an expert on the subject :)