Export to BibTex: Does a .cls style file in Zotero affect the format of the BibTex file generated?

I looked in the documentation and could not find an answer to the question. I know from reading other posts that the format of the generated BibTex file is controlled by the BibTex.js file in Zotero. What is not clear to me is if a .cls style file has any affect on this export process. I know the .cls style files are meant to format quick copy functions. I just want to confirm that these two methods are total separate and independent from each other.
  • Presumably you mean csl styles? No: the CSL styles have no impact on BibTeX export. You may set quick-copy to either citation styles (defined by CSL) or export formats (defined by JS).
  • Right, thanks for confirming what I thought was the case. For my case, I need to choose the format style of the bibliography using BibTex which has nothing to do with Zotero. I have made adjustments to the bibtex.js file to achieve the desired exported data format.
  • What kind of changes did you make?

    It is often better to either change the .BST style file or use the Better BibTeX Zotero extension to customize one-off BibTeX exports if the BibTeX style you're using is "weird".
  • Um... I'm writing a dissertation that is 600+ pages and spans several fields of study. So in the end, its hard for me to use one journal's citation style. It is also problematic when a Journal is part of Elsevier which uses a document class other than the one required by my graduate office. So to get the formatting correct, I had to split the references into four groups. Group 1 required no special changes, just formatting of the Zotero entries for consistency. Group 2 required major formatting to accommodate Russian, which was accomplished by manually adjusting the Zotero export to BibTex which included typing in Cyrillic. Group 3 was solely webpage citations which since i'm using BibTex didn't work right. So, I changed from 'url' to 'howpublished' and from 'urldate' to 'note' in the BibTex.js file. This change can only be applied when exporting the webpage citations as it messes up other stuff. Group 4 citations have UTF* symbols I could not get supported in LaTex. For Example, rho (\rho in LaTex). This happens when someone writes rho for density in the title of a journal article. For this Group I export to a BibTex file and then manually adjust the entry to comply with the LaTex requirements.

    I'll have to look into the better BibTex Zotero extension for next time.
  • All groups could probably be addressed by using a BibLaTex+biber (or another UTF-8 aware toolchain, but this is the most common).

    If you'd like to stick with BibTeX: Group 3 could be adjusted by customizing your BST style to use and 'url' and 'urldate' and Group 4 should mostly work as-is if you set the character encoding to, e.g. 'Western'.
  • Let me see what could be done using BBT (better bibtex)...

    Group 1: export as usual

    Group 2: what kind of formatting are we looking at? LaTeX-ification? Transliteration? BBT should be able to do either. Anything remaining could be done with a postscript but that could get hairy. I'd like to know more about what you're doing here that Zotero isn't.

    Group 3: Either standard behavior in BBT or a simple postscript that can automate it.

    Group 4: That's LaTeX-ification, and where BBT doesn't do this correctly already this is a fixable bug

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