searching names with diacritics

I recently imported a couple of authors with diacritics in their names and imho I wonder if searching for them could be made more comforable. As someone who does not have the diacritics in question on my keyboard, it is actually not so straightforward to search for such an author. If I type in the name (e.g. Moïsi) without the diacritic sign (Moisi), Zotero doesn't find it. I can only retrieve it by searching for the booktitle. Of course there are other ways around it, such as typing it in LibO and pasting it into the Zotero search, but this seems cumbersome and I think it would be easiest if the Zotero search did not distinguish between a glyph with and without diacritic signs.
  • This isn't currently possible for technical reasons — the Mozilla feature that's supposed to allow this appears to be broken, at least on OS X where I've tested it — but it's obviously something we'd like to have.

    As for typing such characters, that wouldn't have anything to do with your keyboard, just your OS — on OS X, for example, typing accented characters is trivial. I don't know how easy they are these days on Windows and Linux.
  • thanks for your response and disappointing to hear that a solution isn't possible at the moment.
  • The other issue here is the character encoding, particularly pre- vs. de-composed character issue, which we really need to solve. As things are now, if I import http://www.worldcat.org/title/tunel/oclc/1814927&referer=brief_results and the search for "Sábato" or "túnel" I get no results.

    (FWIW, yping accented characters on linux is easy, too, when you set up a "compose" key. Windows is trickier, though I believe there are helper apps).
  • Windows is also easy. You need to enable an international keyboard layout (e.g. US International). These layouts have dead accent keys and use the right-alt key as a compose key for additional symbols to enable accent typing.

    To add a keyboard layout to your options, go to control panel, then pick language, language options, then add an input method, then pick United States-International.
  • It's true it's not so dfficult to type diacritics, but you have to know the name your looking for... Maybe I'm not enough good in languages, but I don't always know when I should type å, ò or š...
  • no one denies that having search ignore diacritics is desirable. The typing advice was just in response to Gitty K's remark that you'd need to type it in LO and copy it over to Zotero.
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