Can I tell Zotfile to rename PDF files not using any hispanic characters?

My digital reader is really limited at handling hispanic characters: papers saved with a single character, say "é" should fail the system. While it is super nice for Zotfile to name the PDF files sincerely, I am very reluctant to "simplify" author's name to address this renaming problem. However, in order to keep the PDF entries synced to the Zotero hyperlinks (in the library, where PDF is a subnode to an item), it is not efficient, if ever possible, to rename the PDF files all by themselves.

Is there a setting that can I turn on, to restrict the character-sets used when renaming the PDF files through Zotfile? An example would be:
* From: Bramoullé_Kranton_2007_Public goods in networks
* To: Bramoulle_Kranton_2007_Public goods in networks
Enforcing such restriction will solve my multi-folds synchronization problem: from Zotero entry, to local PDF file, and finally, to the digital reader. [And, this very restrictive digital reader is SONY DPT-RP1. Their software team is not at all responsive.]

Thank you!

All the best,

-Linfeng
  • At this time, no, it is not possible to have Zotfile remove special characters.
  • Since we're talking a limited number of special characters- (6, if you're just looking at Spanish) - I think it actually should be possible to handle that using replace in a ZotFile Wildcard: http://zotfile.com/#user-defined-wildcards -- but this is admittedly a bit techy if you've never done something like that.
  • edited December 6, 2017
    Could somebody please give an example how one can replace the German Umlauts in the PDF file names with the user-defined Wildcards in zotfile?

    What I want is this:
    ä->ae, ö->oe, ü->ue

    Unfortunatly, the option 'remove special Character' does not do the trick but this:
    ä->a, ö->o, ü->u
  • On a similar note to the above, is there a way to have Zotfile strip out commas from PDF filenames, for the same reason that commas in filenames cause syncing to fail.

    I can't see the safest way to go about this using regex. Any suggestions anybody?
  • edited February 24, 2020
    @dcsw2 You could check if this user wildcard does what you want:

    Set extensions.zotfile.wildcards.user to this value:
    {"1": {"field": "titleFormated", "operations":[{"function": "replace", "regex": "[,]", "replacement":""}]}}
    in the Config Editor and use the wildcard %1 in Zotfile's renaming scheme.

    You can find more examples here: https://github.com/jlegewie/zotfile/issues/455.
    (Some of the documentation on the Zotfile website might be outdated.)
  • @steffeno You could use
    {
    "1": {
    "default": {
    "field": "author",
    "operations": [
    {
    "function": "replace",
    "regex": "[ä]",
    "replacement": "ae"
    },
    {
    "function": "replace",
    "regex": "[ö]",
    "replacement": "oe"
    },
    {
    "function": "replace",
    "regex": "[ü]",
    "replacement": "ue"
    }
    ]
    }
    }
    }

    to replace the Umlauts in the author names. Adapt the code for other fields, if needed.
  • @qqbb Thanks a lot, it works great! (I am not @dcsw2, but I found your answer when searching for how to remove commas from filenames.)
  • It is possible with ZotFile
    ZotFile Preferences --> Advanced Settings --> Remove special characters (diacritics) from filename.
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