This Python program for looking up a DOI and printing a #BibTeX entry looks useful:
All #bibliographic tools I know (#Zotero, Papers, #CiteULike, etc.) do a terrible job with accents/umlauts and need to be hand corrected and I suspect this one is no different. However, it usually takes a few clicks on a journal webpage to get a #BibTeX entry. This program is at least as convenient and lends itself to automation.
@adam42smith As a quick example, using Zotero to generate a BibTeX entry for the article https://europepmc.org/articles/PMC8541564 gives me the author line
author = {Ružić Gorenjec, Nina and Kejžar, Nataša and Manevski, Damjan and Pohar Perme, Maja and Vratanar, Bor and Blagus, Rok},
The first name should have been written as Ru{\v z}i{\' c} in BibTeX. In my experience it's pretty random what you get---sometimes just the nearest accent-less/umlaut-less character, sometimes like this example, sometimes the correct BibTeX formatting. But one must always double check the Zotero output.
@imdef It's not random at all: by default Zotero exports utf-8, because it's 2023 and escaping accents shouldn't be necessary. In most cases \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} works with BibTeX. If not, set Zotero export encoding to Western and it gets you the expected
author = {Ru{\v z}i{\'c} Gorenjec, Nina and Kej{\v z}ar, Nata{\v s}a...
@adam42smith That's a nice fix, thanks! How do I change export encoding in the web version?
@imdef I don't believe the API (and hence the web version) allows you to specify encoding, though it's been discussed, also for Overleaf integration.
@adam42smith That's a pity because Zotero is really good in other ways and the browser button is brilliant.
@imdef why do you need this on the web? The original tool you linked to would also run locally, no? Essentially every part of Zotero is more powerful when run locally, *especially* BibTeX integration, which also comes with an additional add-on for key management etc. https://github.com/retorquere/zotero-better-bibtex
@adam42smith Personally, I'm not looking for a full citation manager, but for a convenient way to add to my large, manually curated and carefully double-checked BibTeX file. I'd rather run a tiny command-line Python code than fire up a GUI for generating new BibTeX entries that I check and add information too before saving in my BibTeX file.
@imdef Not sure what issue you've had with Zotero and umlauts, but (like pretty much anything these days) it's completely unicode complient, so has no issues with any accented characters unless they're misencoded at the source (which happens for Worldcat, but no other major site I'm aware of)