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My citation organisation tool of choice (so far) exports umlauts like ö as \"{o}. When these occur in the beginning of the first author's name of a bib entry, the citation shorthand is generated from the letters before the umlaut and with the dots above the first number of the year.

enter image description here

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[style=alphabetic,backend=bibtex]{biblatex}

\usepackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{lib.bib}
@book{Goethe1773,
    author = {von G\"{o}the, JW},
    title = {Götz von Berlichingen},
    year = {1773}
}
\end{filecontents}
\addbibresource{lib.bib}

\begin{document}

In~\cite{Goethe1773}...

\printbibliography
\end{document}

When I change the \"{o} manually to {\"o}, the shorthand is consistent with the others (Göt73), when I change it to ö itself, it becomes Gö73 (without t).

Can I get Göt73 without manually editing each umlaut-containing bib entry each time I export my library? (With biber as backend this is what I get in all three cases, however, there are other problems with my library.)

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3
  • Well as it works fine with biber: solve whatever problem you have with this backend. bibtex expects the other input and doesn't handle utf8 correctly.
    – Ulrike Fischer
    May 22, 2015 at 8:52
  • 1
    Sorry, but isn't the name spelled "Goethe"?! To me, "Göthe" looks plain awful.
    – Mico
    May 22, 2015 at 9:13
  • Using ö instead of \"{o} works fine for me, using latexmk in MiKTeX.
    – bers
    Aug 1, 2019 at 7:07

1 Answer 1

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4

First of all, the specific example can be better solved using the correct spelling for the name, which is Goethe, but I'll assume that this choice was deliberate in order not to mention any specific real case.

The correct syntax with BibTeX is

G{\"{o}}the

enter image description here

There's nothing you can do about it, except fixing the entries.

On the other hand, if you use Biber, you can type either

G\"othe

or

Göthe

Here's an example:

\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@book{Goethe1773,
    author = {von G{\"{o}}the, JW},
    title = {Götz von Berlichingen},
    year = {1773}
}
@book{Goethe1773x,
    author = {von G\"othe, JW},
    title = {Götz von Berlichingen},
    year = {1773}
}
@book{Goethe1773y,
    author = {von Göthe, JW},
    title = {Götz von Berlichingen},
    year = {1773}
}
\end{filecontents}

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[style=alphabetic,backend=biber]{biblatex}

\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

\begin{document}

In~\cite{Goethe1773}, in \cite{Goethe1773x}
and in \cite{Goethe1773y}

\printbibliography
\end{document}

enter image description here

If you examine the .bbl file, you'll find a difference between the three items: in the first the author turns out to be G{ö}the, which may be relevant as far as collation is concerned, but a rough test seems to reveal it isn't.

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6
  • Doesn't the question already mention Biber (and rule it out)?
    – Joseph Wright ♦
    May 22, 2015 at 8:56
  • @JosephWright Yes, I added the Biber example and pointed out that there's nothing to do when BibTeX is used.
    – egreg
    May 22, 2015 at 9:03
  • Thinking about down-voting this answer and any others that mis-spell "Goethe" as "Göthe", or "G{\"o}the", or some other variant that generates an Umlaut...
    – Mico
    May 22, 2015 at 9:19
  • 2
    @Mico I guess that the OP wanted to deliberately use a wrongly spelled name, so not to point to any specific real case. I added some words about this to my answer. By the way, in these days I'm reading “Italienische Reise” (in Italian translation).
    – egreg
    May 22, 2015 at 9:26
  • 1
    It would have been nice if the OP had had the decency to use "Gödel" as the name for these trials...
    – Mico
    May 22, 2015 at 9:27

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