How to correctly export accented characters in bib file?

billtubbs

I'm using Zotero to compile my bibliography and TexStudio to write my report in Latex.

My procedure is:
1. Select all references
2. Right-click, select 'Export items...' menu option
3. Then 'Format: BibTex, Character Encoding: Unicode (UTF-8)', then 'Ok'

This produces the .bib file.

However, when I generate the bibliography in TexStudio I get errors like:

Package inputenc Error: Invalid UTF-8 byte sequence. ...illar, R.~d., Hodouin, D., and Poulin, �.

This is due to the following text in Zotero and in the .bib file:

author = {Desbiens, A. and Nunez, E. and Villar, R. del and Hodouin, D. and Poulin, É.},

which is the text straight from Zotero for this item.

This is then translated to this text in the .bbl file:

\bibitem[Desbiens et~al., 2008]{desbiens_using_2008}
Desbiens, A., Nunez, E., Villar, R.~d., Hodouin, D., and Poulin, Ã. (2008).
\newblock Using {Process} {Control} to {Increase} the {Energy} {Efficiency} of
{Mineral} and {Metal} {Processing} {Plants}.
\newblock {\em International Journal of Power and Energy Systems}, 28(2).

Note the 'Ã' character here.

I can fix this problem by MANUALLY changing the contents of the bib file to:

Poulin, {\'E}}

But I want to know what I'm doing wrong. Am I using the wrong text encoding, is it even a problem in Zotero export or in fact a problem in TexStudio bibtex compilation?

adamsmith

Short version: Either change.the encoding on export or use \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} in the LaTeX preamble

billtubbs

Thanks. But it looks like the template I am using already uses UTF-8. I found this in the main file's headers:

%% Encodage utilisé pour les caractères accentués dans les fichiers
%% source du document. Les gabarits sont encodés en UTF-8. Inutile
%% avec XeLaTeX, qui gère Unicode nativement.
\ifxetex\else \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} \fi

The comment roughly translates to:
"Encoding used for accented characters in document source files. Templates are encoded in UTF-8. Useless with XeLaTeX, which supports Unicode natively."

I tried replacing this with \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} and it didn't solve the problem.

So, as you suggested, I also tried changing the character encoding when exporting to 'Western' and now it works. The bib file contents now look like this:

author = {Desbiens, A. and Nunez, E. and Villar, R. del and Hodouin, D. and Poulin, {\'E}.},

thanks.

bwiernik

If you are writing with BibTeX, you should install and use the BetterBibTeX plugin. With this, you can also export the bib file converting those characters into TeX escapes