Different languages in my bibliography biber problem

Question

I am starting to use biber with biblatex for my bibliography. I cite books in French and Spanish therefore several books and articles have accented letters in titles or author's names. I hadn't had any problem compiling my .bib file, which I have been using for two now, with bibtex. But now with biber there seems to be problems with some of my entries, not all though.

I am using TexShop and compile with Latex.

Here you'll find some lines from my preamble that might be relevant:

\usepackage[british]{babel} 
\usepackage{csquotes} 
\usepackage[backend=biber,style=authoryear]{biblatex}

 \addbibresource{MyBib.bib}

 \usepackage[colorlinks, allcolors=blue, breaklinks]{hyperref}
  \begin{document}
  \autocite{key}

  \end{document}

When I run the bibtex (the graphic option is called bibtex buy I am using biber as backend) I get the following message at the very beginning:

"\x{fffd}" does not map to ascii at /var/folders/1t/gfg6lx791ds0hfh1hxskk8y40000gp/T/par-696675636873/cache-955b5cd96386991ca6623279060097e4c757d28e/inc/lib/Biber/Utils.pm line 932.

Trying to compile with Latex again I get the message:

Undefined control sequence. St\x{fffd}phanie

This argument corresponds to the author name in one of my entries. I modified the entry as shown below:

St{\'e}phanie

in my .bib (JabRef), but this does not solve the issue.

What can I do? And is there a way of finding a solution that does not involve going through my entire bibliography database changing characters one by one?

Answer 1

This sort of thing is easily solved if you are using biber. As it uses UTF-8 by default, there is good reason to use the same encoding in your bib file. That is, to use é rather than the traditional (Bib)TeX method of writing {\'e}.

Of course, if you ever need to use BibTeX on the existing .bib file, you'll run into problems if it is UTF-8. However, biber can easily fix that for you:

biber --tool --output_encoding=ascii inputfile.bib

This will produce a file called inputfile_biber.bib, which should be ready for use with traditional BibTeX.

In the case above, it looks like biber is feeding you a .bbl that is UTF-8, but your document is using the traditional OT1 encoding, which has little to recommend it nowadays. For most Latin-alphabet-based documents that rely on the pdfTeX engine (i.e., compiling your document with latex or pdflatex), I recoomend you use:

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc} 
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

(This problem shouldn't normally have arisen if you use XeTeX (xelatex) or LuaTeX (lualatex) to compile your document...)