If the filenames are in unicode NFD (I don't know), replaceFrom="\\p{M}" replaceTo="" regexOpts="g" will work for Zotero 7. A similar solution is available for Zotero 6, but you'd have to write out "\\p{M}" (which is possible but tedious).

Thanks for the regex suggestion, @emilianoeheyns. I unfortunately am not getting it to work.

@dstillman, thanks for letting me know that modern systems should support accents. I wanted to change them out, as I've had problems in the past and had my system therefore set up without accents, and I would like consistency across my library.

Avoiding inconsistency is indeed a good reason why diacritic removal from file names is useful.

Diacritics are not universally applied in all data sources that a user may add to Zotero. So if author names are included in file names for example, it is likely that one will end up over time with the same author's name inserted in file names both with and without its diacritic(s). That creates difficulties when searching by file name (outside Zotero for example). (the same problem occurs when searching for author names within Zotero, although that's not the file naming issue raised here).

If there were an easy way of correctly inserting all missing diacritics in existing data like that, that would of course be preferable. But that does not exist as far as I know. So, failing that, a simple approach to remove diacritics from all file names is the "least-bad" option. That's presumably why it is an option in Zotfile's renaming scheme. Many Zotfile users would have large file collections where diacritic removal from file names has been standard practice. I certainly do.

I have also had batch file code fail on Zotero filenames with diacritics when processing files outside Zotero, where unicode support was lacking. Where the code was designed to find "orphan" files - files no longer in Zotero's database but still present on disk - that can lead to files being mis-designated as orphans (which could lead to such code wrongly deleting them). That's why I started using Zotfile's option.

Further, I see now Zotfile was using a Zotero function to remove diacritis (here), Zotero.Utilities.removeDiacritics. Then, if the function is already defined, why do not adding it with an option (maybe through Customizing the Filename Format) to use with the renaming function getFileBaseNameFromItem?

(cc @dstillman, @AbeJellinek, @tnajdek)

Thanks!