Accented (French) characters in BibTeX database

Question

I am having some difficulty using French letters in my LaTeX document. In my bibliography, I have this reference:

@article{CLDM03,
  title={A Cinematography System for Virtual Storytelling},
  author={Nicolas Courty and Fabrice Lamarche and Stéphane Donikian and Éric Marchand},
  journal={Lecture Notes in Computer Science},
  pages={30--34},
  isbn={3540205357},
  issn={0302-9743},
  year={2003},
  publisher={Springer}
}

But what I get in the references section of my document is this:

[CLDÃM03] C OURTY N., L AMARCHE F., D ONIKIAN S., ÃL'RIC M ARCHAND: A cinematography system for virtual storytelling. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (2003), 30–34.

Obviously, the abbreviation is incorrect. It should be CLDM03 (the first letter of the last names of the authors), but also there are some strange letters in the names!

Any idea how that could be fixed?

By the way, just in case you are wondering, I already have texlive-full installed.

Answer 1

Which BibTeX are you using? BibTeX8 is an 8-bit implementation, but the original BibTeX is only 7-bit and will not cope with accents at all well. Even if you do use BibTeX8, there are lots of accents it cannot cope with, and you'll need to give them in escaped form, for example

{\'E}ric Marchand

This is why there is so much interest in BibTeX replacements which are UTF-8 capable, in particular biber.