Re: undefined control sequence bug with German umlaut in bibliography

[Pontus Lurcock <pont@talvi.net>]

On Sat 04 Jun 2011, Julian Becker wrote:

> I'm not familiar with the intricacies and details of UTF8 encoding,
> but is it possible that there is a byte missing from the "ä" which
> has been cut off during the abbreviation process?

Well, there *is* more than one way to represent ä in UTF-8, but it's
my understanding that anything beyond ASCII is simply not supported by
BibTeX. You can get away with it in fields that just get pasted
verbatim into the output (usually), but the first three letters of the
first author's name are used to construct the key (which is why
‘Schräger’ worked) so there's no way around using the officially
sanctioned {\"a} form.

> > unfortunately, I'm using Mendeley Desktop for the management of my
> > bibtex file and I can't seem to be able to influence the way in
> > which it encodes the special characters.

This is one reason why I still use plain emacs as a bibliography
manager -- sooner or later you need a hack, and that's harder when the
raw BibTeX is hidden or generated. In this case you may need to
put the hack between Mendeley and BibTeX: pipe the file through 
‘sed -e 's/ä/{\\"a}/g'’ or something similar. And/or ask in the Mendeley 
support forums, since this is a fairly well-known BibTeX ‘feature’
so perhaps someone else has had to deal with it there.

Hope this helps,

Pont
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