On Sat 04 Jun 2011, Julian Becker wrote:
I'm not familiar with the intricacies and details of UTF8 encoding, but is it possible that there is a byte missing from the "ä" which has been cut off during the abbreviation process?
Well, there *is* more than one way to represent ä in UTF-8, but it's my understanding that anything beyond ASCII is simply not supported by BibTeX. You can get away with it in fields that just get pasted verbatim into the output (usually), but the first three letters of the first author's name are used to construct the key (which is why ‘Schräger’ worked) so there's no way around using the officially sanctioned {\"a} form.
unfortunately, I'm using Mendeley Desktop for the management of my bibtex file and I can't seem to be able to influence the way in which it encodes the special characters.
This is one reason why I still use plain emacs as a bibliography manager -- sooner or later you need a hack, and that's harder when the raw BibTeX is hidden or generated. In this case you may need to put the hack between Mendeley and BibTeX: pipe the file through ‘sed -e 's/ä/{\\"a}/g'’ or something similar. And/or ask in the Mendeley support forums, since this is a fairly well-known BibTeX ‘feature’ so perhaps someone else has had to deal with it there. Hope this helps, Pont