Hi,

many thanks for sharing your zotero->biblatex translator!

I just wanted let you know some troubles I discovered: with the following biblatex' .bib file:

@Article{ El03,
author = {Loughran, Ellen},
title = {Tentative Beginnings: Montaigne Rewrites His Early Essays},
journaltitle = {Neophilologus},
date = {2003},
volume = {87},
number = {3},
pages = {371-383}
}
@Book{ lc-fr,
author = {Mittelbach, Frank and Goossens, Michel},
title = {\LaTeX{} Companion},
publisher = {Pearson Education France},
date = {2006-02},
location = {Paris},
pagetotal = {1116},
edition = {2},
isbn = {978-2-7440-7182-9},
translator = {André, Jacques and Bellet, Benoît and Charpentier, Jean-Côme and Hufflin, Jean-Michel and Soulet, Yves}
}

your translator gives the following .bib file:

@article{__????,
urldate = {2010-5-4}
},

@article{loughran_tentative_2003,
title = {Tentative Beginnings: Montaigne Rewrites His Early Essays},
pages = {371-383},
journaltitle = {Neophilologus},
author = {Ellen Loughran},
urldate = {2011-0-9},
date = {2003}
},

@book{mittelbach_latex_2006,
location = {Paris},
edition = {2},
title = {{{\textbackslash}LaTeX{}} Companion},
isbn = {978-2-7440-7182-9},
language = {Français},
pagetotal = {1116},
publisher = {Pearson Education France},
author = {Frank Mittelbach and Michel Goossens},
translator = {Jacques André and Benoît Bellet and {Jean-Côme} Charpentier and {Jean-Michel} Hufflin and Yves Soulet},
urldate = {2011-0-9},
date = {2006-02}
},

@misc{lehman_textttbiblatex_2010,
title = {The {\textbackslash}texttt{biblatex} package},
url = {http://tug.ctan.org/pkg/biblatex},
author = {Philipp Lehman},
urldate = {2011-0-9},
date = {2010-11-19}
}

The troubles are namely the following ones:

1. urldate are malformed (2001-0-9 instead of 2011-01-09),
2. LaTeX commands are wrongly formed: enclosed between braces and backslashes translated in {\textbackslash} (whereas they should be just copied just as they are),
3. names (for authors, editors, translators, etc.) are translated 'FirstName LastName' whereas they should be written ''LastName, FirstName',
4. languages should be keys (for instance 'Français' should be 'french'),
5. entries are separated by commas but they should be nothing between them.

You may see that the previous points are indeed wrong in the biblatex .bib example file provide by the biblatex' author:

http://mirror.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/biblatex/doc/examples/biblatex-examples.bib

and also in the biblatex' documentation, pages 32 for dates, 24 for LaTeX commands and 29 for names.

Another trouble is the first entry:

@article{__????,
urldate = {2010-5-4}
},

(maybe due to the date when the zotero collection was created).

One request feature could be to make the fields less indented but the "=" signs vertically aligned, as in the original .bib file above.

Nevertheless, thanks a lot again for your work!

(4) above will be hard-- languages aren't keys in Zotero, so there's little hope of catching all the variation in input.

You're welcome.

Maybe I'll joined the project despite my little knowledge of JavaScript.

1. Nice!

2. You say: "And this is not the case with the standard BibTeX-translator?": maybe it is, I didn't use it. But biblatex is much more permissive than BibTeX from this point of view.

3. You say: "Biblatex can as far as I know handle both forms.". If I'm right the form 'LastName, FirstName' is much more recommended, in order to help bibtex, bibtex8 and biber to separate without any ambiguity last and first names.

4. You say: "They don't have to (p. 17 biblatex 0.9 manual).": indeed, you're right. But, if available, keys are recommended as they can hence be translated, depending the current babel language. You say: 'Translating user-submitted language names into keys is very nontrivial (I, as a native Swedish speaker might write "Franska", someone else "Français" or "French". There is also a problem with lists, the language-field in Zotero is just plain-text. How to parse that in a safe way?)': You're right and it should, in Zotero, preferably be given as standardized keys (if I understand well, it's your purpose in the following comments).

5. You say: "This is what the standard BibTeX-translator does as well (and it has worked for me previously). Maybe that is an acceptable format for bibtex (it has never complained about such files)?" Maybe BibTeX-translator is not very clean from this point of view. But cleaner .bib files should be better, don't they? ;)

Regards.

<blockquote>The forum supports the &lt;blockquote> tag.</blockquote>

The forum supports the <blockquote> tag.

Ok. I've fixed 1. (urldate), 3. (lastname, firstname) and 5. (commas between entries).
New version: BibLaTeX-2011-01-10.2.js

This is what I do with urldate, maybe it isn't optimal either. If one doesn't add an accessDate, it uses dateAdded (meaning also that all types of entries get an urldate, but I guess biblatex styles don't print it for types where it's irrelevant).

if(item.accessDate){
    writeField("urldate",item.accessDate);
} else if(item.dateAdded){
    writeField("urldate",item.dateAdded.substr(0,10));
}

Update:
A new version that works with Zotero 2.1.x has been released. Get it here:
http://code.google.com/p/zotero-biblatex-export/downloads/list

I also started out on some kind of documentation, at first describing the field mappings. Mostly to open this up for discussion (there could certainly be improvements, and I could have missed some things in the latest versions of the biblatex database-specification as well).
The list is here: http://code.google.com/p/zotero-biblatex-export/wiki/FieldConversionList

Also, there is now experimental support for zotero RDF in the latest versions of biber and biblatex and there has been some discussion on hooking directly into the zotero database. Eventually, this translator might become obsolete. More info here:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=2802610&group_id=228270&atid=1073795

Getting data directly from the database would minimize the trouble with having to export bib-files all the time. In the meantime, for some kind of automation, there is of course Jason Friedman's export script using MozRepl:
http://www.curiousjason.com/zoterotobibtex.html
(if someone is interested I could provide my hacky version with the added ability of extracting a specific collection by name).

Greetings
Anders

No, no reason. I'll try to get it added soon.

New version again.
I have sorted out the handling of creators a little more (and documented it on FieldConversionList).

I removed preservation of "uppercase characters in non-initial positions" with braces, which means Denis's isssue 2 in above post is "solved".

I also tried to remove the escaping of \ with {\textbackslash}, thus solving Denis's issue 1. This didn't seem to break anything, using either biber or bibtex8 with UTF-8. Latex commands in titles etc. work. The drawback is that a backslash character in a title (if that is ever used) must be written \textbackslash. This kind of locks the user to LaTeX, which isn't the goal of zotero. This has been discussed before in this thread.
I really don't know what is the best practice really. The affected part of the code is this map, where also some other things are escaped into LaTeX commands:

var alwaysMap = {
	"|":"{\\textbar}",
	"<":"{\\textless}",
	">":"{\\textgreater}",
	"~":"{\\textasciitilde}",
	"^":"{\\textasciicircum}",
	"\\":"\\"
//	"\\":"{\\textbackslash}"
};

Greetings
Anders.

BTW, there is a typo in the initial post of this thread: there is a spurious (single) quote just after "zoterolibrary" in the sentence:

(Just drop it into your 'zoterolibrary'/translators/ directory)

It is invisible but present when copying/pasting:
(Just drop it into your 'zoterolibrary'/translators/ directory)
It took us a lot of time, a student and I, to detect the trouble when searching this directory on a Windows machine.

Hello,
Thank you so much for that excellent translator.
Juste one thing : :
When you say : : "/translators/ directory"

This means that you have to go to zotero's settings -> advanced -> then click on the directory that will open the ad-hoc windows.

I just give that detail because I took time to understand it haah

Whatever thanks again it's very useful.

it's preferences-->advanced
http://www.zotero.org/support/preferences

the translator folder is in the data directory. If it's not, something's wrong.

that shouldn't happen, no - but if Zotero weren't able to access it, it wouldn't work at all. It's probably nothing to worry about, but still would be nice to find out why:
Produce an error report ID right after clicking that button:
http://www.zotero.org/support/reporting_bugs#provide_a_report_id

My question about whether how the file is named matters didn't get answered. Does it?

My question about whether how the file is named matters didn't get answered.

What question?