Unintended conversion from LaTex to typesetted symbol

[mayrmt]

Description

Here's a minimal example of my problem with betterbib format. The file my.bib, that I want to format, looks like this:

@article{Test2022a,
  Author = {Body, Some}, 
  Journal = {Newspaper},
  Number = {5}, 
  Pages = {7--9},
  Title = {Title with a greek symbol: $\alpha$},
  Volume = {5},
  Year = {2022}}

Running the command betterbib format my.bib produces the following output:

@article{Test2022a,
 author = {Body, Some},
 journal = {Newspaper},
 number = {5},
 pages = {7–9},
 title = {Title with a greek symbol: α},
 volume = {5},
 year = {2022},
}

I'd like to not convert $\alpha$ to the typesetted version "α". In fact, I'd like to retain the original `$\alpha$ for later processing in LaTeX.

Context

1. File my.bib is fully local. I don't pull anything from any web database.
2. Here's the version info delivered via pip show betterbib:

   Name: betterbib
   Version: 4.3.8
   Summary: Better BibTeX data
   Home-page: 
   Author: 
   Author-email: Nico Schlömer <nico.schloemer@gmail.com>
   License: 
   Location: /usr/local/lib/python3.9/site-packages
   Requires: appdirs, kgt, pybtex, pylatexenc, requests, requests-cache, rich, tomli, unidecode, x21
   Required-by: 

[mayrmt]

Here's a similar conversion from Latex commands to typesetter symbols:

Bibtex entry:

@article{Bechet2009a,
  author = {B\'echet, \'Eric and Mo\"es, Nicolas and Wohlmuth, Barbara I.},
  journal = {International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering},
  number = {8},
  pages = {931--954},
  title = {A stable Lagrange multiplier space for stiff interface conditions within the extended finite element method},
  volume = {78},
  year = {2009}}

Output of betterbib format my.bib:

@article{Bechet2009a,
 author = {Béchet, Éric and Moës, Nicolas and Wohlmuth, Barbara I.}, 
 journal = {International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering},
 number = {8}, 
 pages = {931--954},
 title = {A stable Lagrange multiplier space for stiff interface conditions within the extended finite element method},
 volume = {78},
 year = {2009},
}

It looks like betterbib is doing the Latex typesetting. Maybe add an option to suppress it?

[mayrmt]

@nschloe Is there anything that I can do to assist in fixing this?

[mayrmt]

There also seems to be the problem, that curly braces (used to protect capitalization within paper titles for example) are removed during the betterbib formatting. This leads to unintended de-capitalization in the betterbib output.

[nschloe]

This is fixed in betterbib 7.