Searching library for titles or creator names with accents

aasiddiqui
Is there anyway to change the search settings so that letters with diacritics are included in the results?

For example, my library contains papers by an author with the last name Pressé. I want the journal article info to have this correct spelling when I import the paper, so that it is right when I make my reference list.

However, if I want to find papers by this author in my library and I type "Presse" (without the accent) into the search bar, nothing shows up. I only get results if I type "Pressé" (with the acute accent) into the search bar. This is rather inconvenient, especially considering ALL of the various diacritic accent marks that can be used in entry titles and author names from around the world. Is there a way to conflate the various diacritic marks in the search settings so that they are included when search terms just have regular letters?
  • adamsmith
    This is a very longstanding request, and it's definitely on developers' radar, but no, there's not currently an option for it.
  • mleight
    I'm having an issue entering the accented letters into the platform for a source at all. I saw a post from 2013 about it, but I have to put the correct letters into Word and copy/paste back into the program. I have a Spanish and French language keyboard downloaded to my PC, but none of the shortcuts (eg: CTRL + ') work to enter the characters. Any thoughts on how I could be doing this more efficiently?
  • adamsmith
    On a Spanish keyboard, say, é is option/alt e. I think on the French AZERTY it's option 2, on a US International keyboard its ' followed by e -- all of these work in Zotero. ctrl+' is a Word specific shortcut that might work in some other tools but isn't anything systemwide and doesn't work in Zotero
  • b0c5
    edited April 5, 2025
    Hello, any updates on this request? There are often minor diacritics variations in author names, because the same author can appear slightly differently in different works (for random reasons).

    Same applies to title, not just creator (and any field, really). Just ignore diacritics when searching
  • Beanmin
    Hello, I'd like to second this request
  • friedsoap
    Hi,
    I just had this issue: I could not find an author I already had in my library because I missed the diacritic.

    This issue is specially important since many authors names have diacritics in their name in their mother tongue, but once they go into international publishing, their names start to be "anglicised" or renamed according to the main tongue of the publisher, i.e. diacritics are removed.

    @dstillman: any way to add option to toggle "diacritic substitution" option when using searches. This could also apply to any field, actually, as suggested in the conversation above.

    Ideally, I'd like to keep the option to substitute or not, for refined searches, but I admit that I would leave it in "diacritic substitution" mode most of the time.

    Thanks,
    Aleix
  • adamsmith
    As noted above, this has long been on the roadmap, no need to convince anyone of why this would be helpful/important: https://github.com/zotero/zotero/issues/1300 (please don't comment on GitHub issues with anything other than technical comments related to implementation)

    It looks like from the last comment that the most recent framework update has made this easier.
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