[OS X TeX] Texshop, bibtex and utf-8

[Martin Bergren]

> On 16 Nov 2015, at 15:01 , Herbert Schulz <herbs at wideopenwest.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> I tried it out with one of my files and it does seem to work fine in both TeXShop and when processed in Terminal. My knowledge of UTF-8 encoding is minimal but it just may be that those accented characters are simply passed through bibtex without processing (will the sorting be right?) because they can be considered valid ASCII characters when the top bit is masked off.

That sounds like a good guess. In general, I want to avoid compound characters like \”u and instead use ü in the source file in order for search to work in the pdf file. So if bibtex can pass through non-ascii, it would be great. However, as you say, sorting may be off. 

I tried out biblatex a few years ago, but I didn’t like the standard format. The plain format in bibtex is just fine and I didn’t want to invest time to lean to hack my own format just to obtain a simple plain  bib-format. 


> I can only speculate about why TeXstudio doesn't like it. It may test and see that the file is saved as UTF-8 and `knows' that bibtex may not like that. Pure speculation on my part.
> 

Sounds likely though.


> By the way, you may be interested in using the pdflatexmk engine in TeXShop. It's one of many engines based on the use of the latexmk perl program supplied with TeXShop; it's the only one that's active by default though---look in ~/Library/TeXShop/Engines/Inactive/Latexmk for mor information and other engines. It will automatically do all the work of typesetting the document, running bibtex, etc. Just put the line
> 
> % !TEX TS-program = pdflatexmk
> 

I just tried it; it seems to work fine! (Although the occational need to manually rerun bibtex and pdflatex a few time have never really bothered me.)


Cheers,  


Martin Berggren
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Department of Computing Science, 
UMIT Research Lab
Umeå Universitet
Campustorget 5, S-901 87 Umeå, Sweden. Ph: +46-70-732 8111
http://www.cs.umu.se/~martinb, Martin.Berggren at cs.umu.se