[XeTeX] BiBdesk / BiBTeX

[Adam R. Maxwell]

On Dec 18, 2005, at 12:08, Martin Henning wrote:

> Holà,
>
> just downloaded BiBDesk for my next paper... Unfortunately it will  
> be a mixture of Russian, German and English, so it will have to be  
> unicode :) Therefore as usual: XeTeX. Anyone here using this setup?  
> Does the preview feature work for you? It seems to me, that i can't  
> get the paths right :/

This should work fine.

Are you talking about BibDesk's TeX preview feature, or something  
else?  If so, I think we set the paths for gwTeX by default (and it  
won't let you enable the feature if the executables aren't found).   
In the "Preview" pref pane, the preview template needs to be modified  
for XeLaTeX, using something like

\documentclass[letterpaper]{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}

\defaultfontfeatures{Mapping=tex-text}
\setromanfont{Hoefler Text}
\setsansfont[Scale=0.94]{Gill Sans}
...

You'll want to choose a font that has the necessary characters,  
though.  Also, make sure the "TeX template encoding" popup is set to  
UTF-8, so it gets passed to TeX properly.

> Also i got errors because of the automatic conversion of accents  
> into TeX - disabled it, thinking unicode/XeTeX will handle it  
> anyway - my assumption right? I would greatly appreciate some hints  
> on using BiBTeX/Desk, since i never did it before - not even with  
> non-Unicode :)

You are correct; the conversion is not necessary in this case.  It  
sounds like you're using the wrong encoding, though, since (I think)  
those errors won't come up if you save the file with an encoding that  
supports them.  In the "File" pref pane, make sure the String  
Encoding popup is also set to UTF-8.

hth,
Adam