I am one of the Zotero developers and regularly import items with French accents without any problems. Please provide a specific example of a record that you could not import. Thanks.

Firefox currently suffers a weird problem rendering Orbis's unicode diacritics: they appear offset from the characters over which they are meant to appear and are generating bogus characters on import. At the moment, this is appears to be a Firefox issue, but we are looking on a work-around.

Yeah, we're aware of that—we didn't create the demo, and it's somewhat unfortunate that it showcases a bug in Zotero so prominently, but it's otherwise a really nice demonstration of Zotero's features, so we decided to make it available.

Incidentally, on the library page featured in the demo, Zotero handles the accents just fine if you select a single item, either by clicking through to the individual page or by selecting a single item from the multiple selection window. It only has a problem when you select multiple items at once. We're looking into it, and hopefully once we fix it Steve will update the video.

I don't want to sound like a whiner but I thought I should mention this:

When sorting authors alphabetically in the central pane, authors with an "é" in their name (as in the French "Prévost") are not sorted alphabetically.

For instance, "Prévost" appears after "Priestley."

I might be wrong but I would expect diacritical marks to follow the regular alphabetical order.

Raf

Just checked in two patches on the dev branch for improved sorting. (Item rows are sorted in JS, not SQLite, and Mozilla does offer collation support via XPCOM.)

Collections and items should now sort using a collation appropriate for the application and/or system locale, at least in theory. In practice I haven't tested how good the collation support is or how well it addresses the issues raised in the previous thread, but it should at least generally fix sorting of diacritics.

At least one site still problematic with diacritics
is FirstSearch's WorldCat, which just produced this strange result from Spanish:

Caf�, Caballo Y Hamaca: Visi�n Hist�rica Del Llano / Zucchi, Alberta.
which should be
Café, caballo y hamaca :
visión histórica del Llano

While we're at it, the second author is included in the title from WorldCat.

Hi, here are some ideas about several of the issues you mentioned:

What character encoding is your Firefox set to use? I think it needs to be set to Unicode (View -> Character Encoding -> Unicode (UTF-8)). If I have the encoding set to something else on the WorldCat pages, I see placeholder marks rather than diacritical marks. However, with the the Unicode setting I see the correct characters, the characters import correctly into Zotero, and they export correctly using the word processor plugin (for OpenOffice.org, in my case).

As far as the capitalization of titles is concerned, have you used the "Transform Text" function? After entering a title, highlight the title field with your cursor and right click (don't left click to open the field for editing, though). You should see a "Transform Text" menu that will allow you to change to Title Case or lower case as needed, depending on the language of the title.

I believe that entering accented characters is something to set up in your Operating system or in Firefox rather than in Zotero itself. For example, in Linux, I use a series of key combinations including the "Compose" key to type such characters in all applications, including Firefox and Zotero. If you don't want to set something up for all applications, you might consider the Firefox extension called "Zombie Keys":
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2335

For the problems with the page numbers, it might be better to post in this thread:
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/1680/wrong-page-numbers-in-word/
It sound like you're seeing the same thing as was reported there.

I encounter the same problem when I import an Endnote library.
1. In the .txt file I created, the references are perfect, exactly as they are in Endnote
2. In Zotero, all the accuented characters appear differently.
Here is an example of a book title :
1274 : Année charnière. Mutations et continuités. Lyon-Paris, 30 septembre-5 octobre 1974

The result in Zotero :
1274 : AnnÚe charniÞre. Mutations et continuitÚs. Lyon-Paris, 30 septembre-5 octobre 1974

I add that the caracted encoding in Firefox is Unicode (UTF-8).

Is there any explanation?

This sounds dumb, I know, but where exactly is the address bar for Zotero ... and where is the about:config menu so that I can fix the automatic capitalization problem??

Use firefox's address bar (that contains the URL of the current page). See MozillaZine's about:config KB entry.

Why can't the text from WorldCat or other libraries come into the Zotero record exactly as it appears the source database?

Many sites are scraped fine with UTF-8 characters.

Sometimes the data that Zotero scrapes is not identical to what you see on the screen (for many translators, an RIS or MARC or whatnot is downloaded & these sometimes can't reflect nuances of data (incomplete info or no/poor support for not-latin characters)).

Please list actual URLs that fail...

If anyone from the Zotero organization is reading this -- OCLC FirstSearch/ WorldCat is the single most important site with which Zotero needs to work. If the program can't capture the diactritics and correct capitalization of words in titles, then I can promise that humanists working in languages other than English will not use this program.

You're not the first person to do this, so I don't mean to pick on you, but all of this threatening "I'll take my marbles and go home if you don't do X" hand-waving is not the most productive way to make your point.

For one thing, do you even KNOW that the fault is with Zotero?

For another, it's quite enough to say that you consider this a high priority problem. And then be a little patient: the developers have likely hundreds of other such problems to deal with.

lemur: I'm not being defensive, if you mean an irrational rejection of criticism. I'm not even contesting that Zotero might have some problems in this area, since I've previously seen them myself (though encoding problems are all over the place on the web it seems to me, which no doubt presents some problems for Zotero). I'm merely pointing out that this is a free software project, where people can and should contribute to their own solution. Your bug report is an excellent example of how to do that.

Dev XPI doesn't seem to be updating since version 1988.

When I try to download I get this:

"Firefox could not install the file at:
...
because: Invalid file hash (possible download corruption)
-261"

I tried several times.

First of all, Zotero looks like the most promising piece of bibliographic software I've seen in a long while. Make that ever. But, like other users above, I've had problems with the recognition of encodings and consequent mangling of diacriticals. I'm using Zotero on Kubuntu 7.10, default locale en_GB.UTF-8, same also in Firefox. When importing my main bibtex file (which is also in utf-8), all diacriticals are mangled: Zotero refuses to treat it as anything but ISO8859-1...

Zotero can be appeased by doing this:

user$ iconv -f utf-8 -t iso8859-1 original.bib > iso8859-1.bib

and then importing iso8859-1.bib into Zotero. This obviously requires one to first edit original.bib so that it only contains records that work in ISO8859-1.

It works, though it took me a good hour to import 3200 records from a bibtex file.

Love Zotero, and respect those working on it. Keep up the great work!

That said, Zotero 1.07 still doesn't import macrons (I can't vouch for other diacritics) properly from WorldCat. I am using FF3 (fully updated) and viewing WorldCat in UTF-8, but the macrons are simply dropped from my citations. That's better than garbling, but it's still not perfect.