Re: Character folding in the pretest

["Elias Mårtenson" <lokedhs@gmail.com>]

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On 5 Feb 2016 1:06 a.m., "Werner LEMBERG" <wl@gnu.org> wrote:
>
> This naturally leads to a possible user option: Having `optical'
> matches or not, where `optical' means `base character plus diacritic
> and/or slight modifications', e.g., o → ø → ö etc., etc.

I think this statement shows how easy it is to introduce cultural bias,
although the fact that your name sounds German suggests that personal
preference is involved.

How do you even define "optical similarities"? Should l and I compare the
same under this definition? They certainly looks similar. What about p and
q? They look like mirror images of each other. What about z and s? They
even sound similar. To a Swedish speaker there are zero similarities
between a, ä and å. They are, in fact, just as different as a and z are to
an English speaker. I really cannot emphasise this enough, and reading this
thread tells me that it needs to be emphasised even more.

As someone who lives in an English speaking country and using English
keyboards, while still working with documents in various languages, I see
first-hand the need to have ways of searching for characters that I can't
easily type on my keyboard, but this issue is orthogonal to that of
character equivalence. The conflating of these two issues are, in my
opinion, the root cause of many of the disagreements in this thread.

My personal preference is that the expected behaviour of searches is more
related to the locale of the user, rather than that of the document being
searched. In other words, as a non-Spanish speaker, I'd expect to be able
to find ñ when searching for n, even if the document I'm searching in is in
Spanish. There are definitely an infinite number of counter-examples to
this (enough to keep this thread going for another 100 messages, I'm sure),
but at least there is reason to consider making the default based on the
locale of the user.

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