I am not using Lyx, but I have just gone through this issue with my own Zotero setup. The issue is that Zotero encodes everything with UTF-8 (Unicode), so the exported .bib files it creates will also have UTF-8 encoding. BibLaTex is UTF-8-compatible, but BibTex is not; so, if you are trying to compile with BibTex or Biber, i.e., you have a line such as \usepackage[backend=biber, citestyle=chem-acs, maxbibnames=99]{biblatex}
in your preamble, it will give you an error complaining about UTF-8. In my case, I'm using TexWorks, so I only get the error when I recompile with pdfLaTex. This is a major issue and there are many open questions about it.
I tried adding \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
to my preamble, but it didn't help.
A currently-working solution is to use the excellent 3rd party Zotero Add-on zotero-better-bibtex to export a BibTex-formatted .bib file with the UTF-8-encoded characters swapped to LaTeX-encoded characters. There is currently no way to do this by default in Zotero.
In order to install the add-on, I had to upgrade to the latest version of Zotero and then install zotero-better-bibtex according to the instructions:
In order to export the .bib with unicode swapped to LaTeX
- select export > Format:
Better BibTex
(not Better BibLaTex
(BibLaTex is UTF-8-compatible))
- In TexWorks,
- Compile with pdfLaTeX
- Compile with Biber
- Compile with pdfLaTeX
I can now compile without errors and get a PDF of the bibliography with properly formatted special characters