Exporting words with accents from Zotero to BibTeX

douglasrizzom
Hi guys, I just came over a small annoyance that I thought it'd be better to post here.

I am using a citation style with LaTeX that writes authors' names in all capital letters sometimes, and in normal casing other times. The problem is, when you have names which have accents, like Kovács or Legány, BibTeX has a preference for the usage of native TeX syntax to symbolize these accents, such as

author = {Kov\'acs, Ferenc and Leg\'any, Csaba and Babos, Attila}

instead of

author = {Kovács, Ferenc and Legány, Csaba and Babos, Attila}

so it can capitalize words and letters correctly. Unfortunately, Zotero exports citations using the latter format instead of the former, so when BibTeX processes it, it fails to capitalize letters with accents, so Kovács becomes KOVáCS, for example, instead of KOVÁCS.
  • dstillman
    Enable "Display character encoding option on export" in the Export pane of the preferences, and then select ASCII as the output character set when you export via BibTeX.
  • adamsmith
    that's really a question of the bibtex implementation--some are UTF-8 capable, some aren't. But you can change the encoding of Zotero's BibTeX Export. If you set it to ISO 8859, e.g., it will escape accented and other non-ascii characters.
  • dstillman
    (Technically it should be ASCII, because á is valid Latin-1. In practice anything other than UTF-8 will trigger escaping in the translator, so it doesn't matter what you choose.)
  • adamsmith
    I know, but we don't list ASCII (we don't list ISO 8859, either, I misremembered this), so yeah, the instructions should be anything but UTF
  • dstillman
    Oh, I forgot we shortened the list. We can just say "Western" (which probably means ISO 8859-1) for clarity.
  • douglasrizzom
    It worked. Thanks guys. I'll be sure to spread the word about zoh-TAIR-oh!
  • Ateris
    Hi there, I see that this is very old and for Douglas was solved, but I have the same issue, I have character Á that won't be exported correctly to overleaf. If I put \'A it will be imported as \{textbacslash}'A and once compiled it just displays a \. I presume the latter is on the overelaf side, but the fact that it won't export correctly should be on Zotero, no?
    (I already tried to follow the suggestions here above but it didn't work)
    Right now if I go under preferences, export I see:
    Item format: BibTeX
    and
    Import Character Encoding: Western

    I hope someone can help me out!
  • adamsmith
    How are you exporting though? If you're using the built-in Overleaf integration, the export settings don't do anything -- that uses the API which always outputs UTF-8
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