Yes, you have to bother, BibTeX is completely incapable of UTF-8 (whoever says otherwise, is sadly mistaken. The various "BibTeX replacements" are more pain to set up than they are worth, and in my experience plain don't work). The most reliable source to date has been this (extra)official BibTeX documentation.
In the body of the text, use UTF-8. It looks much nicer, the friendly language teacher next door can also correct your worst mistakes that way.
For BibTeX, in your .bib
files use {\'o}
and so on, even if told \'o
"works the same" (it doesn't!). BibTeX considers {\somefunkymacro L}
to be an L
(to be handled as such for sorting purposes) with some fancy \somefunkymacro
accent (the braces are critical here). This makes some nice tricks possible, i.e., define a \noopsort
macro to be able to give an entry like:
@Book{lHopital96:_analy_infin_petit_lignes_courb,
author = {{\noopsort{Hopital}}de l'H{\^o}pital,
Guillaume Marquis},
title = {Analyse des Infiniment Petits
pour l'Intelligence des Lignes Courbes},
publisher = {Paris},
year = 1696
}
This sorts like Hopital
, without mangling the good marquis' name in the bibliography.
S{\'a}enz
. That way, the author's surname will be sorted as if it were written as "Saenz", i.e., without an accent. Conversely,Sáenz
will be sorted by BibTeX afterSzabo
-- probably not what you want, right? See How to write “ä” and other umlauts and accented letters in bibliography? for more on this.S{\'a}enz
though, but so does Barbara Beeton for avoiding the braces...