Improved search
I suggest adding support for accentuated characters, such as most other search engines. That is, Martinez would search Martínez, Martinez, Martïnez, etc. I have a lot of articles from the same authors, but sometimes they are accentuated and others no. And it is a big problem when you have to use a keyboard layout with no easy access to accentuation combinations.
It would be a great improvement that the search would accept wildcards.
Thank you for this great product. Good work.
Felipe
It would be a great improvement that the search would accept wildcards.
Thank you for this great product. Good work.
Felipe
I guess the way this should ideally work is that if you include diacrits in your search it's explicit - i.e. searching for Martínez only gives you Martínez - but using regular letters will return all relevant diacríts - i.e. search for Martinez will return Martínez, Martinez, Martïnez etc.
If that's too complicated, ignoring diacrits entirely for searches would work, too. I don't think this should be controversial, anyone should feel free to add an issue over at github.
edit:
I solve this search problem, in part, for my SafetyLit database search by allowing each auther name to have a name alias for each spelling varient. Keeping that current is a lot of hand-work -- 340,000 records with 1000+ added each week. With a Zotero library, even a very large one, less user effort would be required. Zotero would need to add db table to allow users to list author spelling equivalences. The db structural changes might be a lot of work for developers. This added complexity for the purpose of an author name search might not be welcome to most users.
Dan would have to say, but I imagine the way to go would be to just use some type of existing collection of conversions - Zotero already has the removeDiacrits (or whatever it's called exactly)function to handle this. If that only works for 98% of all cases so be it - it'd still be a huge improvement over the status quo.
What the world needs is an author registry. But, if the existing attempts to do this are any indication, I don't think that is likely to happen in our lifetimes.