[Tex/LaTex] Accented (French) characters in BibTeX database

accentsbibtex

I am having some difficulty using French letters in my LaTeX document. In my bibliography, I have this reference:

@article{CLDM03,
  title={A Cinematography System for Virtual Storytelling},
  author={Nicolas Courty and Fabrice Lamarche and Stéphane Donikian and Éric Marchand},
  journal={Lecture Notes in Computer Science},
  pages={30--34},
  isbn={3540205357},
  issn={0302-9743},
  year={2003},
  publisher={Springer}
}

But what I get in the references section of my document is this:

[CLDÃM03] C OURTY N., L AMARCHE F., D ONIKIAN S.,
ÃL'RIC M ARCHAND: A cinematography system for virtual storytelling. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (2003), 30–34.

Obviously, the abbreviation is incorrect. It should be CLDM03 (the first letter of the last names of the authors), but also there are some strange letters in the names!

Any idea how that could be fixed?

By the way, just in case you are wondering, I already have texlive-full installed.

Best Answer

Which BibTeX are you using? BibTeX8 is an 8-bit implementation, but the original BibTeX is only 7-bit and will not cope with accents at all well. Even if you do use BibTeX8, there are lots of accents it cannot cope with, and you'll need to give them in escaped form, for example

{\'E}ric Marchand

This is why there is so much interest in BibTeX replacements which are UTF-8 capable, in particular biber.

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Accented characters and inputenc settings

Disclaimer: This answer has no nice pictures, sorry.

So, to sum up the conversation held in the question's comments, and to provide some additional explanations:

The error was caused by inputenc, which complains about some character found at line 132 of main.tex.
At that line there is only the command \printbibliography, implemented in package biblatex.
So the offending char must be in the expansion of the macro \printbibliography but it is very difficult to find where that character came from.

Some diagnosis tools:

iconv program can convert from one encoding to another. If it finds some invalid character while converting, it stops and outputs an error about the offending char, showing the line number and the column number in that line where the char was found.
So we can run iconv on main.tex and on the .bib file, asking it to convert from latin9 to any other encoding which is a superset of latin9 (such as utf8), and see if it finds some char not in latin9. The command could be:
```
iconv -f latin-9 -t utf-8 < main.tex > /dev/null
```
Note that iconv reads from standard input (which is redirected from main.tex) and writes the result of the conversion in the standard output (which we redirect to /dev/null since we are not really interested in the output, but in possible errors). If an error is found, it will be output to the standard error, which is not redirected, so it will show up in the terminal.
The above test did not produce any output, so no errors were found.

At this point there is two possibilities:

We still did not run the test on the file which contains the invalid latin9 char. Perhaps it is in some auxiliar file which is read by \printbibliography.
Perhaps latin9 definition file for inputenc is incomplete, and the allegedly offending char is indeed a valid char, only that inputenc doesn't know about it.

In order to validate 1., the iconv test should be run in all the files which are input while compiling main.tex. It can be a bit difficult to tell which are all of them.

In any case, removing the line \usepackage[latin9]{inputenc} will make the error message dissapear, so it is an appealing "solution", but note that suppressing the symptoms is not a way for healing a disease. What if there is an invalid char after all?

Well, in absence of inputenc package, TeX is configured to ignore all non-ascii char, so if there is any latin9 character (valid or invalid) it will be silently suppressed in the output. So the worst you can expect is some char missing here and there. This can be difficult to spot, so to be in the safe side I will continue with the iconv tests.

Some final notes:

When you input accented chars using standard TeX accent macros, such as \'e you are using only ASCII chars in the input, so no inputenc package is required. This is required only if you want to enter accented chars "directly" (i.e: é).
If you can input directly é, you need to be sure about which encoding your editor uses to save the file. Most common encodings for european languages (french, spanish, italian, and others) are ISO-8859-1 (also known as latin1), ISO-8859-15 (also known as latin9) and utf8. The last one is indeed a way of coding the whole Unicode charset, so all alphabets are covered.
With respect to accented vowels, both latin1 and latin9 use the same codes, so you can give any of them as option for inputenc. The main difference between these encodings is that latin9 has a code for the euro sign (€) while latin1 does not.

I would do an additional test, just out of curiosity. Bring back inputenc package, but use latin1 instead of latin9. If there is some kind of bug in latin9 implementation, perhaps the bug is not present in latin1, and (unless you need the euro sign or other rare characters such as Š, š, Ž, ž, Œ, œ, or Ÿ, there will be no difference at all.

[Tex/LaTex] BibTex style database

It should be more a comment than an answer but I do not have enough rep to comment.

I was managing the bst database at bst.maururu.net but do not have enough time to continue doing so. Of course, I kept a dump of the db, the code of the website and, most importantly, the archive of all styles. To host it, one would need a web server with MySQL and PHP, at their most basic versions.

I would be happy to transfer all that to anyone willing to handle it. Thank you in advance for your help!

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Accented characters and inputenc settings

[Tex/LaTex] BibTex style database

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