[biblio] escaped characters in biblatex

[Philipp Stephani]

2011/9/1 Haines Brown <brownh at historicalmaterialism.info>:
> In all fields it seems that there are certain characters that must be
> escaped, such as \# and \=. However, these are mentioned as examples,
> and I've not been able to find a complete list. For example, I
> encounted a direction not to use an ampersand as in "Roman &
> Littlefield" for a publisher, but to escape the ampersand as in "Roman
> \& Littlefield" or replace the ampersant with "and". However, biber
> does not gag on the unescaped ampersand, and this leaves me uncertain.

These characters have special meaning for LaTeX, not for Biber. This
applies to the characters $, %, &, {, }, #, but never to =.

>
> It seems that the author field can not have accented characters, which
> must be escaped as in \`{o}. However, it does not always work. The
> guide I use is http://www.bibtex.org/SpecialSymbols/, but if taken
> literally is says that one needs to escape accented "o" characters,
> but not a or e or u. Is that guide complete in that some accented
> characters need escape but not others? Also, the guide does not
> entirely work. For example, it implies I should escape the vowels in
> the name Lászl\H{o} Mér\H{o} in this way, but the bibtexkey name then
> appears as "MerHo". But if I do it more conventionally as Mér\"{o}, it
> shows up properly as "Mero". Any reason why bibtexkeys can't have
> accented characters or even Chinese characters?

Biber is fully Unicode-capable, so you can enter all characters
directly, without the old LaTeX syntax: ò, ő, ö.