Accents not transferring

Karrowr

I’m pretty new to Zotero and hope to use it to manage several thousand references from a ProCite database. I’m using a PC with Windows 7. I first tried importing the data as RIS files but that didn’t work. But I’ve had excellent success importing files with RefWorks tags. I don’t have the RefWorks program, but have been able to add the tags to the appropriate fields in ProCite, export the file as a tab-delimited text file and then import the .txt file into Zotero. This works perfectly EXCEPT that any accented character displays as a question mark inside a black diamond in Zotero. Zotero will not accept these files if they are .doc files. It WILL accept an .rtf file, but again, no accents. Any ideas?

dstillman

Can you upload an excerpt (e.g., for a single item) that includes accents somewhere (e.g., Dropbox) and provide a link here? We'll want the actual file, not copy/paste.

Karrowr

OK, here's one small file.

https://www.dropbox.com/t/ZGbSPmjoJFVoO0AT

adamsmith

It's a character encoding issue. The file uses ISO 8859-1 (or Windows 1252) encoding. Convert to UTF-8 before importing. There's a list of options here:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/64860/best-way-to-convert-text-files-between-character-sets

I'd personally use Notepad++ on Windows (described a bit down on that page) unless you're already very comfortable with commandline tools.