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.
The following settings are not exposed in the UI, but can be found under Preferences/Advanced/Config editor.
All are prefixed with extensions.zotero.translators.better-bibtex in the table you will find there
default: <not set>
If you have unicode turned on you can still selectively replace some characters to plain-text commands; any characters entered here will always be replaced by their LaTeX-command counterparts.
default: 1
If you have auto-exports set up, BBT will wait this many seconds before actually kicking off the exports to buffer multiple changes in quick succession setting off an unreasonable number of auto-exports. Minimum is 1 second. Changes to this preference take effect after restarting Zotero.
default: 10
Number of seconds to wait after your system goes idle before kicking off auto-exports.
default: 0
When > 0, BBT will automatically pin the first citekey it generates for an item after this many seconds.
default: yes
Support for EDTF dates in biblatex
default: 5
How often the Better BibTeX database should be saved to disk. Defaults to once every 5 seconds. Note that your database is always saved when your computer goes idle, or when you exit Zotero.
default: no
Replaces the “note” field with the bibtex key during citation rendering in Word/Libreoffice. Main use-case is to help migrating word documents to pandoc. This setting only takes effect during startup, so if you change it, you will have to restart Zotero to have this take effect (or to disable it. Please disable it when done). You will want to use a custom CSL style (such as this) to make this work.
default: <not set>
if you set csquotes to a string of character pairs, each pair will be assumed to be the open and close parts of a pair and
will be replaced with a \\enquote{...} construct.
default: config
Can be off, config or always
default: yes
Use BBTs importer instead of Zotero’s importer
default: yes
On import, assign the existing citation key to the item being imported
default: yes
On import, place all bib(la)tex field Zotero doesn’t have an existing field for in the Zotero extra field of the item
default: 5
I’ve had reports where Zotero notifies extensions that references have changed, but if BBT then actually retrieves those same references, Zotero complains they “haven’t been saved yet”. Super. This preference sets the number of microseconds BBT should wait after being notified before acting on the changed references.
default: no
When on, BBT will load kuroshiro for romajization in citekeys. This uses a lot of memory, easily 100MB. If you don’t have Japanese titles/names, keep this off.
default: <not set>
Any characters entered here will prefer a math-mode LaTeX-command counterpart over a math-mode,
if a math-mode command is available. Only useful when mapUnicode is conservative.
default: <not set>
Any characters entered here will prefer a text-mode LaTeX-command counterpart over a math-mode, if a text-mode command is available.
Only useful when mapUnicode is conservative. Characters specified in mapMath take presedence over characters specified in mapText.
default: yes
New translators installed in Zotero are not immediately usuable for drag-and-drop. If you want to use BBT for drag-and-drop (e.g. to drag and drop citekeys or citations), you will be asked whether you want to restart after installation, or whether you want to reinstall when it is more convenient to you. You will be asked this whenever the BBT translators update, but you can disable this by checking “Do not ask again” in that dialog.
default: yes
Name particle handling. Only turn on when requested and we’re talking about it on github.
default: <not set>
You can use a custom postscript per export directory:
postscriptOverride, and set it to a filename like postscript.jspostscript.js (or whatever you set the preference to) and add the postscript you want thereA postscript override will disable caching for that export.
default: no
When you set this on, BBT will import bib files leaving any LaTeX commands as-is, and add the #LaTeX tag for raw re-exports.
default: #LaTeX
When an item has this tag, all its fields will be assumed to hold raw LaTeX and will undergo no further transformation.
If you set this to *, all items will be assumed to have raw LaTeX.
default: no
When exporting a Bib(La)TeX file, if the attachments are stored anywhere under the directory the bibliography is exported to, use relative paths to those attachments. Caching is disabled when this option is on, so it affects performance.
default: a,ab,aboard,about,above,across,after,against,al,along,amid,among,an,and,anti,around,as,at,before,behind,below,beneath,beside,besides,between,beyond,but,by,d,da,das,de,del,dell,dello,dei,degli,della,dell,delle,dem,den,der,des,despite,die,do,down,du,during,ein,eine,einem,einen,einer,eines,el,en,et,except,for,from,gli,i,il,in,inside,into,is,l,la,las,le,les,like,lo,los,near,nor,of,off,on,onto,or,over,past,per,plus,round,save,since,so,some,sur,than,the,through,to,toward,towards,un,una,unas,under,underneath,une,unlike,uno,unos,until,up,upon,versus,via,von,while,with,within,without,yet,zu,zum
list of words to skip in title when generating citation keys
default: url,doi,file,eprint,verba,verbb,verbc,groups
list of fields to treat as verbatim during import. If you’re importing e.g. Mendeley-generated BibTeX, try removing file from this list before import.
default: no
Both Zotero and BBT expect titles to be in sentence-case, but a lot of sites offer import data that is Title Cased. When exporting these titles to bib(la)tex you’re going to get a lot of extra unwanted braces, because all these Title Cased words will look like proper nouns to BBTs own title-casing mechanism. When this setting is on, you will be warned when you import/save items in Zotero with titles that look like they’re Title Cased, so that you can inspect/correct them.