Re: Character folding in the pretest

[Óscar Fuentes]

Clément Pit--Claudel <address@hidden> writes:

> 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 see your point, but you are talking about accents all the time. In
Spanish `n' and `ñ' are different letters. `n' matching `ñ' is no
different than `p' matching `q'. I think that you will agree that some
of us will see that behavior as a glaring bug.

> 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.

I'm not sure how to fix this, but seeing similar reservations from other
users, some language-dependent behavior is unavoidable.