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I work on an institutional repository and want to offer citation information for items in the repository as a bibtex file download.

Which character encoding should I use for writing the bibtex file?

MartinW
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  • BiBTeX or BiBLaTeX? – Dr. Manuel Kuehner Apr 05 '17 at 15:20
  • I thought about BiBTeX, for BiBLaTeX it would probably be UTF-8 and much less hassle? Are the two formats easily convertible into the respective other? Would it make sense to offer BiBLaTeX instead of BiBTeX? – MartinW Apr 06 '17 at 07:26
  • If you start a new project then normally you would choose the newer BiBLaTeX. The documentation is better and the features too. – Dr. Manuel Kuehner Apr 06 '17 at 09:22
  • I made tutorials for BiBLaTeX, have a look if you want: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9lyME-Lpak&list=PL-Wl6F3zpJVwcDHK2rg9bDEEMjo70zp87. There's also a famous question with high quality answers here: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/13509. – Dr. Manuel Kuehner Apr 06 '17 at 09:31

1 Answers1

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Regarding the encoding I would say you have only two options:

  1. ASCII with accented chars and non-western script written as commands or
  2. UTF-8.

I would use UTF-8: It is more readable, and in a lot of cases it will work fine with bibtex.

I would also ensure biblatex/biber compability as biblatex/biber is more picky. While a lot of entries meant for biblatex works with bibtex too, the other way round is not true. Pay attention to the dates (month should be a number, and dates gives as YYY-MM-DD), and you shouldn't use parentheses in the entry keys.

Ulrike Fischer
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