Non-breaking spaces when exporting to bibtex

nlsbckr
hi,

i just had a hard time debugging a failing latex compilation. the reason turned out to be unicode non-breaking space characters present in a bibtex entry that i had exported from zotero to bibtex.

the issue i was having is described here:

http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/96703/bibtex-error-inputenc-error-unicode-char-u8-not-set-up-for-use-with-latex

while there is a workaround, it seems that bibtex, even when using utf-8 input encoding, does not handle non-breaking space in bib entries well.

i suggest that zotero should sanitize the bibtex export to replace them either with '~' but probably better, with ' '.

an example for an entry that contains the non-breaking spaces:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006349513058475

(it's in some of the authors' last names)
  • noksagt
    All of the advice in that thread is not very different from "export in a non utf-8 character set" so that you get TeX entities.

    Non-breaking spaces work for some tool-chains. In tool chains where the unicode encoding does NOT work, it is highly likely that other characters fail as well.
  • nlsbckr
    edited November 14, 2014
    well i'm not a tex encoding expert but i do know that accented latin characters generally work fine in utf-8 in latex. the non-breaking space seems to be an exception since there is already a latex command for that.
  • nlsbckr
    but anyway, is there a way i can make this work now, by using some export setting in zotero? preferably, even by drag and drop into jabref?
  • adamsmith
    I didn't check, but I assume the ISO 8859-1 encoding on export should solve this. If doesn't, we can definitely fix it for that.

    I keep forgetting what the deal is with encoding on drag&drop -- I think it may remember your last setting, but I'm not sure.
  • nlsbckr
    ok, i checked. selecting Western on export to a bib file replaces the non breaking spaces by ~. i tried d&d afterwards. that did not work, the non-breaking spaces were preserved.
  • adamsmith
    I know this has come up before, so either someone else remembers or you can probably find it on the forums with some searching.
  • dstillman
    We don't specify an encoding for exports on drag, so it just uses UTF-8.
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