The Better BibTeX Configuration can be found under the regular Zotero preferences pane, tab ‘Better BibTeX’.
The configuration of Better BibTeX is a little baroque compared to the standard Zotero Bib(La)TeX exporters (which only have hidden preferences). The defaults should just work, but here’s an attempt to describe what they do.
Making any change here will drop your entire export cache. This is usually not a problem unless you have a really large library, but you can read about what is involved here.
default: yes
BibTeX has really spotty Unicode support, so you generally want this on. It will translate things like accented characters to their equivalent LaTeX constructs on export.
default: no
Name handling is a lot more complex than I had ever thought it to be. A lot more complex. BibTeX has really limited ways of dealing with names with particles (van, von, de, etc). If you turn this on, BBT will add code to have van Gogh sorted under Gogh.
default: no
Try to convert a numeric edition value to English words during BibTeX exports
default: no
Most BibTeX styles do not support DOI/URL fields. Of the styles that do support them, many forget to load the required ‘url’ package, so make sure to load it yourself. DOI and URL fields are so-called ‘verbatim’ fields, and without the ‘url’ package loaded compilation will likely fail.
Options:
default: no
BibLaTeX actually has really good Unicode support, so you generally want this off. But for some geezers such as me it is simply more pleasing to have things like accented characters translated to their equivalent LaTeX constructs on export.
default: yes
Use the extended biber 2.7 format for names with particles - only works in BibLaTeX 3.5 or later. This biblatex has a new (less ambiguous) way to store creator names. It’s technically superior, but the LaTeX world moves slowly, so many people won’t have it yet. But if you’re an early adopter, you can enable it here
default: langid
Export either langid, language or both fields based on the item language (if any).
Options:
default: both
Does what it says on the tin, really. If an item has both a DOI and an URL, you can choose to have them both exported, or either one of them. Note that for BibTeX,
you must load the url package when you have doi or url fields. doi and url fields are so-called verbatim fields with different escaping rules, and
BibTeX compilation will likely error out without the package loaded.
Options:
default: <not set>
If there are some fields you don’t want in your bibtex files (such as note for example), add a list of them here, separated by comma’s.
default: 0
Export JabRef-specific fields: timestamps, titles for attachments, and groups for each collection an item is part of. Note that having this on will disable caching in exports, which is really undesirable specifically for auto-exports.
Options:
default: LaTeX citation
Used for drag-and-drop/quick copy using Better BibTeX citation keys. In the Zotero “Export” pane, choose Better BibTeX Quick Copy
as the default export format for quick copy, and choose the desired format for the drag-and-drop citations here.
In the case of Eta templates, the selected items are available as it.items. <%= JSON.stringify(it.items) %> will show you the available data on the items.
Options:
default: cite
Used for drag-and-drop/quick copy citations in LaTeX format. Set the desired LaTeX citation command here. If you set this to citep,
drag-and-drop citations will yield \citep{key1,key2,...}
default: no
Used for drag-and-drop/quick copy citations in Pandoc format. You can use this option to select whether you want
to have these pandoc citations surrounded with brackets or not.
default: using Zotero item key
OrgMode to select items in your library
Options:
default: using Zotero item key
Hyperlink to select items in your library
Options:
default: <not set>
Used for drag-and-drop/quick copy citations in Build your own format. This is going to get pretty technical, sorry.
You can paste a Eta template here. Inside the template, you will find an array it.items, each of which is a serialized Zotero item.
To find out what an item looks like inside the template, export some items as BetterBibTeX JSON.
default: no
If set, generates journal abbreviations on export using the Zotero journal abbreviator, according to the abbreviation style selected in the list below the checkbox.
default: <not set>
Select the style for auto-abbreviation. Only applicable to Juris-M; in Zotero, the style for automatic abbreviation is not configurable.
default: no
Generate quality reports for exported entries. These show up only in BibTeX and BibLaTeX report formats and indicate things like missing required fields and duplicate citation keys.
default: yes
Some importers or Zotero extensions (such as the ShortDOI manager for example) create tags on items that are more for item management than that they are descriptive of the item. When this is off, such tags will not be included in the export.
default: Minimize the number of switches between math-mode and text-mode
When a unicode character can be exported as either a math-mode or text-mode command, map to:
minimal-packages: if both a math-mode and a text-mode mapping is available, use the version that does not require extra packages to be loaded.conservative: if both a math-mode and a text-mode mapping is available, stay in the mode of the previously mapped character if possible. This minimizes the number of generated $s in the output.text: if both a math-mode and a text-mode mapping is available, prefer text.math: if both a math-mode and a text-mode mapping is available, prefer math.Options:
default: yes
If you’re dead-set on ignoring both BibTeX/BibLaTeX best practice (see the BBT FAQ) and the Zotero recommendations on title/sentence casing, you can turn this off to suppress title casing for English items
default: yes
If you’re dead-set on ignoring both BibTeX/BibLaTeX best practice (see the BBT FAQ) and the Zotero recommendations on title/sentence casing, you can turn this off to suppress automatic brace-protection for words with uppercase letters.
default: no
By default, BBT clears all caches whenever BBT or Zotero is upgraded. I can’t realistically predict whether a change in Zotero or BBT is going to affect the output generated for any given item, so to be sure you always have the latest export-affecting fixes, the caches are discarded when a new version of either is detected. If you have a very large library however, of which you regularly export significant portions, you might want to retain the cached items even if that does come with the risk that you get wrong output on export that has been fixed in the interim.
If you have this on, and you experience any problem that is not the cache getting dropped on upgrade, you must clear the cache and reproduce the problem. When you change this setting, as with any setting change, the cache will be dropped.
default: yes
Even though BBT exports happen in a separate thread, some work needs to be done before the background export can start. Part of this work is preloading the cache. You can shorten the (blocking) preparation time by turning off the cache, at the cost of longer export times.