[WEB4LIB] accented words in search term

[Bob Rasmussen]

The answer to the below is that always-useful one: "it all depends". See
below.

On Thu, 25 May 2000, Teresa Doherty wrote:

> I knew the subject of how to incorporate macrons into html pages came up
> just recently, but I have a related question, if anyone could help.
> 
> I'm trying to find out how to use an accented character in the "search
> term" box of an electronic journal search screen. For example, the word
> 'urucú' which has an accented final u (forgive my ignorance, what *is*
> that called? when it goes from bottom left to top right?).

That one is an 'acute'. The one that goes the other way is a 'grave',
pronounced "grahv".

Whether the accent would do you any good is dependent on the particular search
program. Some search programs (and some alphabetization routines) "normalize"
accented text before searching. This means accents are removed, and possibly
ligatures are separated into two letters. Whether this is appropriate and
accurate may depend on the language; in Spanish an n-tilde is considered a
different character from an 'n'. In other languages, an accented characters
is considered the same character as the plain character. But the programmer
writing the search program may not have been a linguist.

> 
> I can use the word with no accent, and the search will return 20
> results. If I shorten the term to simply 'uruc', then I get 138 results,
> but they may not all be what I want.
> 
> How do you suggest that I incorporate the accented character? I thought
> about using a shortcut key, such as is used in Word [ CNTR + ',u] but no
> luck.

Again, it depends, this time on the software you're typing into. The technique
in Word, where a control-plus-special-character combination acts as a
"compose" or "dead" key, is in fact in Word, not in Windows in general. Other
programs may not have this feature.

A more universal solution would be to install the "US International" keyboard
driver into your Windows (I'm assuming Windows here) system. This driver gives
you the ability to create many accented characters, using the keyboard driver
itself, so the results should work with nearly any Windows program. You can
toggle between that driver and the US English driver with a hotkey, or by
using the "language" item in the status bar.

And, it's possible to enter arbitrary ISO Latin 1 (in a US Windows
installation) characters, using the alt-key and the numeric pad. For instance,
for é I look it up in a code chart, see that it is a decimal 233, and then do
<alt-0233> (you must use the numeric-pad numbers, not the ones on the alpha
keyboard).

Finally, you can run the "charmap" utility, and choose, copy, and paste
special characters.

HTH

-- 
Regards,
....Bob Rasmussen,   President,   Rasmussen Software, Inc.

personal e-mail: ras at anzio.com
 company e-mail: rsi at anzio.com 
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