Dear Alan,

I see no reason why one should change well established syntax rules of BibTeX. 
Sharing with others is exactly the reason why one should stick to the rules and 
conventions. I appreciate that BibDesk is enforcing those rules and conventions 
precisely for those reasons. The fact that many programmers responsible for 
citation exports from many journals are ignorant of those rules is also no 
reason to arbitrarily change those rules, e.g. in BibDesk. They simply have to 
learn. I regularly find myself reminding journals repeatedly of those rules, 
sic. To use throughout in all TeX, LaTeX, BibTeX etc. UTF-8 would be a major 
revision with far reaching consequences requiring huge programming efforts I 
would rather not recommend.

Regards,
Andreas


ETH Zurich
Prof. em. Dr. Andreas Fischlin
Formerly IPCC Vice-Chair WGII
Systems Ecology - Institute of Biogeochemistry and Pollutant Dynamics
CHN E 24
Universitaetstrasse 16
8092 Zurich
SWITZERLAND

[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
www.sysecol.ethz.ch/people/andreas.fischlin.html 
<http://www.sysecol.ethz.ch/people/andreas.fischlin.html>

+41 44 633-6090 phone
+41 79 595-4050 mobile

             Make it as simple as possible, but distrust it!
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> On 7 Jun 2025, at 17:46, Adam R. Maxwell via Bibdesk-users 
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Jun 7, 2025, at 08:18 , Alan Munn via Bibdesk-users 
>> <[email protected] 
>> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>> 
>> It seems that BibDesk doesn't allow accented characters in cite keys, even 
>> though neither bibtex nor biber cares about such a restriction necessarily. 
>> Is there a way to turn off this restriction? Although I'm happy to have my 
>> own keys so restricted, when sharing .bib files with others it makes things 
>> complicated since entries with such keys can't be imported.
> 
> Technically a BibTeX citekey is a LaTeX command, so restricted to the same 
> set of characters. The restriction is relaxed quite a bit to include things 
> like dashes, but it doesn't extend to accented characters. I can imagine 
> UTF-8 might pass through biber or bibtex, but you're playing with fire.
> 
> This looks like a pretty good answer. BibDesk basically assumes you're using 
> LaTeX (and IIRC the btparse library enforces this):
> 
> https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/581901/what-is-the-safe-character-set-for-a-bibtex-label#
> 
> Adam
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Bibdesk-users mailing list
> [email protected]
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users

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