Sonny Software

Hi all,
I had sent this mail to Jon and he sugegsted I'd post it on the forum:

I found a funny behaviour in the search dialogue: The simple search does not know the German letter "ß" (sharp s), usually replaced by "ss" in alphabets that have no "ß".
I have a reference with author "Weißer" in my DB.
When I type "Weißer" into the simple search dialog box the reference does not show up.
You have to type "Weisser" to find the reference.
So the "ss" / "ß" replacement works only one way.

Jon's answer was:

I see. There's no way that searching for ss would fine the eszett (right?) because it would be stored as a unicode character (and ss would be two other unicode characters). I'm guessing there is some process on your (German OS) Mac that is making a substitution. I'm sorry, I can't imagine what that would be, I've never had anyone with this problem. You could post this on our forum -- we have many German-speaking users, and perhaps one of them has some insight into this...

Yes, but the unicode substitution works in the other way.
Does any one hve a solution??

Regards HR

Interesting problem… but I fear I don’t have an idea either

ozean, can you (or anyone with a German OS) reproduce this behavior?

Jon
Sonny Software

Hmm, there are some strange things going on.

I created two new entries, one with an author named Schüßler, one with an author named Schaßler.

If I type schaß into the search field in the toolbar, then Bookends finds the Schaßler entry. But if I type schüß then Bookends does not find the Schüßler entry.

I also tried typing schass to find the Schaßler entry, but that did not work.

Then I tried to search for the Schüßler entry by typing both schuess and schüss – both times without success.

The fact that "ss" <> ß is what I wanted to confirm -- that made no sense to me.

As for the search that failed, try typing in the whole name. Or type the name in quote marks. This is likely to be an indexing issue. Quoted searches don't use indexes.

Jon
Sonny Software

Interesting. The quoted full name with ß works in both cases.

When I type Schüßler (without quotes) into the Toolbar’s search field the search generates a hit as soon as I enter the l behind the üß characters.

(The ss > ß substitution doesn’t seem to work in my case. When I search for Schassler, Schass, schass, "Schassler", "schassler" – no hits at all.)

Thanks, ozean, your examples makes perfect sense to me, that's what I would expect to happen (not finding Schüß but finding Schüßl works because the indexes used for "words beginning with" can sometimes be tricky with unicode characters -- it always works in searches within quote marks because they don't use an index for searching).

Jon
Sonny Software

I must apologize if I can't add anything useful but I just discovered this threat while being in a hurry and looking for something else in this forum.

Anyway, it seems that my Bookends is working the opposite way to the OP's one: I look for a name with an ß and not only find every entry with this name but also the ss variations of it (which by the way occur because I have overlooked that Amazon, where I took the data from, has this guy misspelled).
I don't know if this is of any interest or maybe the brand new version of Bookends I use has already fixed the ß search.