I finally managed to solve this problem on my own:
Jabref was encoding the bib-files in 16bit and Bibtex was expecting 8bit-code. After switching to 8bit in the Jabref-options the problem solved itself.
Thank you so much for all your efforts.
I solved my issues of compatibility between the BibTex file exported from Zotero and BibLatex. I recap the solution here.
Apparently BibLatex is much more sensible than BibTex when it comes to reading a BibTex file...
To export correctly the bibliography from Zotero and then into a Tex document via BibLatex I used this BibTeX Export Translator (modified by Robin Wilson) with two important tweaks:
1) On line 11 of the translator script you need to set "exportNotes": true, to "exportNotes": false, (of course just in case you have added notes to your Zotero items, e.g. you extract annotations from PDFs). This will avoid BibLatex crashing on too long fields.
2) On line 2256 you need to tell the translator to avoid adding a comma after each bibliography item (the comma will result in BibLatex giving a warning on the first line of each entry excluding the first...) changing this line: Zotero.write((first ? "" : ",\n\n") + "@"+type+"{"+citekey); with this line: Zotero.write((first ? "" : "\n\n") + "@"+type+"{"+citekey);
Another possible source of problems of the BibTeX Export Translator could be the character encoding. In my translator I kept as in source file "exportCharset": "ISO-8859-1", on line 10. I tried to change it to UTF-8 but it created another class of issues, not with BibLatex (it run without errors) but with Latex,
[1{/usr/local/texlive/2013/texmf-var/fonts/map/pdftex/updmap/pdftex.map}]
(./bib/price2012.tex [2]
! Undefined control sequence.
<to be read again> \edef \blx@tempa {193\x
{FFFD}\x {FFFD}\x {FFFD}219}
l.8 \printbibliography[heading=subbibliography]
for each refsection. It also messed with the "pages" field of some items, outputting:
Andrea B. Hollingshead. “Information suppression and status persistence in group decision making the effects of communication media”. In: Human Communication Research 23.2 (1996), 193fffdfffdfffd219.
I then switched back to "exportCharset": "ISO-8859-1", and both BibLatex and Latex run without warnings or errors. The PDF output was correct:
Andrea B. Hollingshead. “Information suppression and status persistence in group decision making the effects of communication media”. In: Human Communication Research 23.2 (1996), 193–219.
and I also get correct output with the umlaut of Habermas:
EDIT: The problem with the page field was probably due by a odd "-" character that you sometimes get to separate the 2 page numbers when you download the citation from the Internet.
Best Answer
You can store your
bibfile in $LOCALTEXMF/bibtex/bib or any subdirectory of it. Then LaTeX (and BibTeX, biblatex, and biber) will find it. Note that you have to update the filename database whenever you put a new file in this location (but not when the file is only updated). The $LOCALTEXMF part can be any directory which is known to your TeX distribution. For further information about this, see the UK TeX FAQ: