From: Edward H. Trager (ehtrager@umich.edu)
Date: Thu Nov 04 2004 - 11:41:14 CST
> From: Ray Mullan
> To: unicode@unicode.org
> Sent: Wednesday, November 03, 2004 23:49
> Subject: Searching Special Characters
>
>
> Dear All,
> <>Is it possible to write an escape in some form or map special characters to
standard Latin approximations whereby the search engine can be told to read an
NCR such as ğ (g-breve) as the standard latin g? I'm working on a website
with english pages containing Turkish nouns and phrases but I'm concerned that
browsers with conventional Western keyboards will not be able to search these terms.
>
Why not simply have a little table on the web page containing the
set of extended Latin characters used in modern Turkish orthography?
Clicking on one of the extended latin characters would insert that
character as the next character in the string of characters entered
already into the search box.
In this way, users with a QWERTY or any other Latin keyboard layout
enabled could type the majority of the letters just using their default
Latin keyboard layout, and resort to clicking the mouse over letters
in the table only if needed for letters like "ş", "ü", or "ğ".
I took exactly this kind of approach in an online Chinese dictionary
I designed. While many speakers of Chinese (both students and native
speakers) are familiar with the pinyin (拼音) system of romanization
used in Mainland China, people educated in Taiwan often don't know
pinyin but do know the zhu yin fu hao (注音符號) phonetics. In order
to make searching by phonetic pronounciation available to the widest
audience of Chinese speakers possible, I therefore incorporated a
table of the zhu yin fu hao (注音符號) phonetics (also known as
"bo po mo fo") on the web page. The online dictionary is encoded
using UTF-8. CSS and DOM-based Javascript are used extensively.
You are welcome to take a look at it to see if a
similar approach would work for your project:
Online Traditional and Simplified Chinese-English Dictionary
http://eyegene.ophthy.med.umich.edu/hanyu/
- Ed Trager
Kellogg Eye Center
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor
> <>
> <>Any suggestions would be very welcome.
> Ray Mullan
----- End forwarded message -----
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