On 10/08/2009 05:55 PM, Stefano Franchi wrote:
Dear all,
is there any special trick to using a .bib file encoded as UTF-8 with
LyX/Latex? If there is, I would certainly appreciate knowing about it...
Here is my problem/use-case:
I use Jabref as my bib files editor. After inserting a reference which
contained the character Ž (Latin capital Z with caron), Jabref suggested I
switched the encoding to UTF-8 because the current one (8859-1, I suppose),
did not contain the requested character. I accepted the kind offer. Alas, now
all the references containing diacritic marks are screwed up in the Latex
output. for instance Schöpfungs- has become Schöpfungs- and so on.
Help or pointers to approriate documentation greatly appreciated. I am sure
the day will come when I will master these encoding issues. Unfortunately I
do not seem to be there yet.
It sounds like there may be a couple issues here.
First, unless I'm mistaken, standard BibTeX simply does not support
UTF-8, or any other sort of mutli-byte encoding. Perhaps this has
changed, but Philip Lehman wrote just a year and a bit ago: "In contrast
to what a lot of users think, it is not and has never been possible to
use UTF-8 in bib files. Neither traditional Bibtex nor Bibtex8 support
multibyte encodings such as UTF-8. If it seems to work with some files,
it only does so by chance." And because BibLaTeX also relies upon BibTeX
for some of its work, this won't change even there.
There's also this project, though:
http://biblatex-biber.sourceforge.net/. Basically, it replaces BibTeX
with a program written in Perl. I haven't tried it, but it should be
possible to use it with LyX if you're also using BibLaTeX. It may even
work without it. I don't know.
The weirdness with Schöpfungsis probably due to a conflict between the
encoding of your document and the encoding of the .bib file. E.g, the
document isn't in UTF-8.
Richard
