[OS X TeX] encoding and special characters in TexShop and BibDesk

[Adam R. Maxwell]

On Sep 24, 2006, at 09:20, Gordon Sick wrote:

> I've been watching with interest the discussion of encoding accented  
> characters. I write in English, but many important papers I cite  
> have authors whose names have accents. I'd like to know how to get  
> this done properly.
>
> But for me, the bigger issue is in the sorting and searching for  
> their papers. For example, if I file a paper in BibDesk with the  
> name Sødal, then it isn't found when I search for Sodal, etc. Is  
> there a way to make the standard search engines broaden a search so  
> that searching for Sodal always includes Sødal, etc?

This is an interesting example.  BibDesk transforms characters when  
searching, so that if you have a name "Bürger" you can search for it  
as "bu" and match "Bürger" and "Burt" (for example); however,  
searching for "bü" explicitly will require the accent.

Our diacritic-insensitive searching doesn't work for ø, though, and  
I'm not sure if there's a built-in solution for it.  Other search  
mechanisms may have a similar problem.  Where are you sorting, and  
what are you using to search?

> If I can do this in BibDesk, that is put in the name Sødal for the  
> paper, what encoding commands to I need to get this translated to  
> something that Latex won't choke on? I use cmr and Lucida fonts.

This is a different question; if you use character conversion in  
BibDesk, it will convert ü to {\"u}, which is an ASCII representation  
that any TeX will understand.  You could also disable character  
conversion and use UTF-8 with xelatex, or Latin1 with the appropriate  
inputenc package command.  The main thing is that you should use the  
same encoding for your .bib file and your .tex file.

hth,
Adam

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