What's the correct syntax for accents?

Question

I've found that writing "Sáenz":

S\'{a}enz
S\'aenz
S{\'a}enz
S{\'{a}}enz

Produces the same output.

It gets even trickier when you have two accents in a row, such as in "comunicação" (portuguese):

comunica\c{c}\~{a}o
comunica\c{c}\~ao

(and perhaps some other combinations (?))

What is the correct syntax, and why?

Answer 1

Taking into consideration what was stated by Alan Munn, as long as there is utf8 encoding in your text, you can just write the words normally and just forget about the accents. e.g:

\documentclass{report}
\RequirePackage[T1]{fontenc}
\RequirePackage[utf8]{inputenc}

\begin{document}
Sáenz e Comunicação
\end{document}

However, as stated by Barbara Beeton, IF you MUST stick with the explicit syntax, then avoid the {} braces, since those suppress kerning between letters in a word, i.e.:

\documentclass{report}
\RequirePackage[T1]{fontenc}
\RequirePackage[utf8]{inputenc}

\begin{document}
S\'aenz e Comunica\c{c}\~ao
\end{document}

Furthermore, Mico pointed out a really important issue when using Bibtex (but not biblatex/biber): it's best to use: 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 after Szabo

Answer 2

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.