Authors with extended/international characters

cricketbird
I'm running into issues with authors with "extended characters":
1) I can't search for them by name
2) Their PDFs (renamed by zotero to author-date-title) aren't indexed by the PDFindex feature
3) When citing them in Word, I sometimes (but not always) get a weird character in place of the extended character

I saw there was an earlier discussion at: http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/12684/special-character-search/ but it was a little too "techy" for me to follow.

Has there been any progress on this? Or, can someone give a walk-through for how to use the suggested fixes the folks there mentioned? This is giving me nightmares today!

Mac 10.6.6
FF 3.6.13
Zotero 2.0.9

Thanks,
CB
  • ajlyon
    1. Can you not search for them because you can't type the characters, or does searching not work even if you do enter the correct characters?
    2. I think this issue should be going away-- in fact I thought it had been dealt with and wasn't an issue for Macs at least. Can you generate and submit debug output and an error report ID for an attempt to index one of them?
    3. Can you isolate what characters cause this in Word? This shouldn't be a problem, but some fonts won't have support for some characters, which could be messy at times. Your best choice may be to switch fonts -- some have better Unicode coverage than others.

    The discussion you linked to is just about the 1st issue you raise, and it has not been resolved yet. Hopefully we can find a way to handle this before Zotero 2.2; I don't think that anything is going to happen before then.
  • dstillman
    Re: #2, this was fixed in Firefox 4, but it required a function change on our end. I've now made that change on the trunk, so this will be fixed in the next 2.1 release.
  • cricketbird
    1) Sorry - I should have been more clear. I can search for them if I type the extended character, but sometimes they are listed both with and without the strange character. Would it be possible, for example, for Åhman to show up when searching for either Ahman or Åhman?

    Here is me searching for Ahman: https://skitch.com/cricketbird/rx6yc/zotero
    Here is me searching for Åhman: https://skitch.com/cricketbird/rx6y8/zotero

    It would be nice if they'd show the same results.

    2) The Debug ID is D1784065890. The error I get is "PDFs with filenames containing extended characters cannot currently be indexed due to a Firefox limitation"

    Also, I hadn't noticed before, but in addition to having problems with the extended characters, it is complaining about indexing some files that DON'T appear to have any strange characters in the PDF name (but saying they do)...hmmmm....For example, what's wrong with "Pass et al. - 1998 - Vertebrate herbivory on Eucalyptus—identification .pdf"? It was not indexed and dashes are allowed, aren't they?

    3) I fixed the Word issue yesterday by re-typing the name (including accents) of the references, and that seems to have done it. Perhaps the character just LOOKED like an accent grave (french), but was a picture of it or something - I don't know much about fonts. However, after typing it, it looks exactly the same, but it now works in Word. I don't know how to get back the "bad" reference.

    Incidentally, I can search for "Ahman" in the Word Zotero plugin search box and it finds it fine. It's just in Zotero proper that A and Å aren't the same.

    Thanks again for your (as always!) speedy response!
  • cricketbird
    Dan - does this mean I have to update to FF 4/the next Zotero Beta? I was trying to avoid beta software while I'm working on my dissertation, but I might need to bite the bullet and do it...

    (Plus FF 4 at last glance wasn't working with some of my plugins.)

    Thanks,
    CB
  • ajlyon
    Incidentally, I can search for "Ahman" in the Word Zotero plugin search box and it finds it fine. It's just in Zotero proper that A and Å aren't the same.
    Really!? The behavior really should be the same.
  • dstillman
    Dan - does this mean I have to update to FF 4/the next Zotero Beta?
    You don't have to do anything, of course. But the indexing issue with extended-character filenames will be fixed only in Firefox 4 and the next (not current) Zotero 2.1 version. Zotero 2.1 Final is just around the corner, though. And there's an em dash, which is an extended character, in your example above.
  • ajlyon
    Firefox 4 final is also just around the corner, so soon pretty much everyone will be making the switch. Still, file indexing is probably not incredibly urgently needed (and if it is, you can just rename the files to things like "12314.pdf") for your dissertation work, so you can wait the couple of weeks remaining before Firefox 4 and Zotero 2.1 both leave beta.
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