Re: Character folding in the pretest

["Clément Pit--Claudel" <clement.pit@gmail.com>]

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On 02/04/2016 10:59 AM, Óscar Fuentes wrote:
> After seeing the case I mentioned (`n' matching `ñ' in
> Spanish text) it is obvious that the feature is not ready for prime
> time.

This is interesting. I guess it boils down to whether you're trying to avoid false positives or false negatives. For me the strength of this feature is that it lets me find virtually anything using an dumb keyboard (one without easy access to accents); I don't care too much about false positives (that is, I don't mind if ‘n’ finds ‘ñ’). In that sense, it doesn't matter if letters "are different"; all that matters is whether they look different. I imagine that's why the Unicode standard defined things that way. It seems this behavior is consistent with that of most online search engines (I tried Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo; all return accented matches for unaccented keywords).

I'm wary of smart solutions based on locale or buffer language. It's not uncommon to be writing a single document in multiple languages; especially if names are involved. Plus, it's not obvious that a single set of settings is enough for each locale. For example, one could argue that folding accents makes no sense in French: ‘supprimé’ means ‘removed’, but ‘supprime’ means ‘removes’. Yet it is not uncommon for people to write the latter for the former, especially when using a dumb keyboard.

Clément.


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