umlauts & other animals

[john harding]

People search my site (www.ourtext.co.uk) mainly by composer name, and many composers were unwise enough to have things like umlauts in their names, and so are destined to remain unsold. Shoppers might try, for example "oe" or even "o" for "ö" but they will fail.

I don't suppose there's a way round.

[Steve G Griggs]

Accented characters.

It would make more work but there IS a way to get accented characters, umlauts etc into actinic. Search on Google for HTML entity codes, these will give you the full range of accented, Cyrillic Math symbols and Greek letters, but you'll need to wrap them in the Actinic code that indicates HTML when they go into products and fragments. I have used the entity codes however I'm not too sure about the search side of things though as they are being marked up as HTML code...
Maybe some other kind Actinic expert will help out here?

[Paul Bulpit]

I don't suppose there's a way round.

As it's a quiet Friday afternoon....

I suspect that whilst you yourself want to be pedantically correct, you may have to ASCII-simplify your site - use the names that your searchers will be typing. e.g. Carreno instead of Carreño, Jerabek instead of Jerábek.

Do you actually know how they are searching? There is a simple tweak in the KB (& AUG) that you can apply, to find out.

Another suggestion would be to use Product Duplicates to list all your composers by name in addition to the scores by ensemble, then they wouldn't have to search in the first place. I think there's a way of separating your Section List when you do this....

Though actually I couldn't find many diacritics on your site anyway!
__________
Paul

[Duncan Rounding]

I assume you must be referring to people searching that either have foreign keyboards or that know how to input the these characters into the search.

Using ASCII codes etc for these characters in Actinic will more likely lead to other issues and they will still not be searchable.

Look into Paul's suggestion trying find additional ways to make the products more accessible to visitors without relying completely on the search facility.

[Paul Bulpit]

Duncan, Steve,

I think John's referring to the fact that HE uses diacritics correctly, but his customers DON'T have foreign keyboards or know how to type the accented characters.

On his site he has work by Carreño & Jerábek, but searching for 'Carreno' or 'Jerabek' on a English keyboard brings up 'Not Found'.

[Duncan Rounding]

True - then as you said he needs to include the 'English versions' in the product text so it can be searched.