Unusual characters in bibliography with T1 encoding

Question

I'm using biblatex to handle my bibliography, and there are certain names in my .bib file that contain unusual characters. Normally, biblatex handles this just fine.

Unfortunately, the journal I'm submitting to has \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} as part of their template, and in the T1 encoding, these characters disappear. Composing the characters out of standard LaTeX diacritics rather than using precomposed Unicode characters seems to make no difference.

Is there any way around this without changing the font encoding (which I'm unsure if I can do)?

MWE:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{biblatex}
\addbibresource{mwe.bib}
\begin{document}
\cite{testentry}
\v{S} \v{s} \v{r}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

@misc{testentry,
    author={\v{S}a\v{s}kov\'{a}, Kate\v{r}ina},
    title={Test Entry},
    year={2021},
}

The same happens if I give the name in UTF-8 as {Šašková, Kateřina} instead of using \v{S} and \'. Strangely, this doesn't happen if I use \v{S} and such in my document itself.

Answer 1

I'm guessing you've "inherited" somebody else's bib file, and that this person used BibTeX (along with a suitably chosen bibliography style) to create their formatted bibliographies. There's nothing wrong with this, of course. However, it is important to be aware of how to enter "accented" characters properly for use by BibTeX. My additional guess is that the person whose bib file you've inherited didn't do this job entirely correctly. Please see the most-upvoted answer to the query How to write “ä” and other umlauts and accented letters in bibliography? for more information on this subject [shameless self-citation alert!].

To fix the situation at hand, you need to change

author={\v{S}a\v{s}kov\'{a}, Kate\v{r}ina},

to

author={{\v S}a{\v s}kov{\'a}, Kate{\v r}ina},

Aside: The issue you've encountered is not really related to the use or non-use of the T1 font encoding. Rather, it's about the input encoding: e.g., ascii (which doesn't know about accented characters at all!) vs utf8 (which lets you employ the letters Š, š, á, and ř directly). I'd actually strongly recommend the T1 font encoding instead of, say, the OT1 font encoding. Why? Doing so will let you copy and paste words with accented characters from the pdf file into a plain-text file created with the help of a utf8-enabled editing program.

By the way, if you know you'll always be using biblatex and biber to create the bibliography and hence that you'll never be using BibTeX, you might as well just write

author={Šašková, Kateřina},

to begin with. A major advantage would be that the surname Šašková won't be treated, for sorting purposes, as if it were spelled Saskova.

---

\documentclass{article}
\begin{filecontents*}[overwrite]{mybib.bib}
@misc{testentry,
    author={{\v S}a{\v s}kov{\'a}, Kate{\v r}ina},
    title={Test Entry},
    year={2021},
}
\end{filecontents*}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc} % or,
\usepackage{biblatex}
\addbibresource{mybib.bib}
\begin{document}
\v{S} \v{s} \v{r} \cite{testentry}
\printbibliography
\end{document}