kbibtex manages bibtex files very nicely, including the recoding of UTF-8
characters typed in into their latex equivalents (e.g., ó becomes {\'o}).
The new 2.3 version (in debian squeeze already) has updated routines to search
google scholar and directly import the bibtex reference.
Mateo.
On Thursday 08 October 2009, rgheck wrote:
> 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
>
>
