Unicode characters in bibtex

Question

I am struggling with unicode chars in bibtex (Debian). I have the following entry in my .bib file:

@Book{bjork2009,
author = {Tomas Björk},
title = {Arbitrage Theory in Continuous Time},
publishe = {Oxford University Press},
year = {2009}
}

and it works fine for plain bibliography style, but fails horribly for the more alphanumeric styles (e.g. apa, alpha) - the error reported is:

! Undefined control sequence.
<argument> \protect \astroncite 
                                {Björk}{2009}
l.3 ...rotect\astroncite{Björk}{2009}]{bjork2009}

any ideas how to get it working?

Answer 1

Bibtex is not really unicode aware. In order to use extended characters, you need to use the standard Tex replacements.

You might however want to use biblatex for a better management of bibliographic styles; and maybe have a look at biber, which aims to become a unicode aware Bibtex replacement.

Answer 2

In our case, we didn't have Unicode symbols rendered in the bibliography.

We generate bibliography with bibtex and use Texmaker to edit and preview the tex files.

The solution that worked for us was to add the following to our .tex file:

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

Answer 3

This is it! I was exporting my bibliography from Zotero and running into trouble with é, ñ, ç and other non-ascii characters in author's names. FWIW, if you're using LyX, you shouldn't put this directly in the "Latex Preamble" section of the "Document Settings" menu (pdflatex will complain of doubly setting the encoding): the menu option setting the encoding is "Document Settings > Language > Encoding"