> I don't quite understand why you want to place É, È, Ë, Ê all along
> with E, yet Å,Ä,Ö after Z. Because that's what the Swedish alphabet
> says?
The È... comes from French surnames and our French developer wants to group all versions of E together. The É... can be found in French surnames in Sweden as well as in Germany.
The program, GRAMPS is a genealogy program used in about 20 languages, so there is no preferred language.
> Please understand that collation varies across languages. For example
> in German, we also have Ä, but it does *not* come after Z. Instead,
> there are two ways to collate Ä (telephone book vs. dictionary):
> 1. Ä sorts exactly like A
> 2. Ä sorts as if it was transcribed as Ae
I know. However, Swedish telephone books and dictionaries are sorted the same:
A,B,C... X,Y,Z,Å,Ä,Ö.
> So there is no one true collation of Ä, but you have to take into
> account what language rules you want to follow.
True. I agree.
GRAMPS runs in the locale of the user, but must be able to handle information coming from many other languages/countries. That's why it's hard to be universal.
> If you want to implement Swedish rules, why then do you also want
> to support É, È, Ë, Ê? Do you have these letters in Swedish at all?
We can have them in names. See above.
> If you want to use obscure collation rules, you might have to
> implement the collation algorithm yourself. For example, assign
> each letter a unique number (different from the Unicode ordinal),
> and then sort by these numbers.
>
> Take a look at ICU, which already includes collation algorithms
> for many locales.
I think we have found a solution that can handle most cases.
We treat surnames beginning with "ÅÄÖ" special. I don't think that there are many surnames outside the Nordic countries that starts with any of these three letters.
Vielen dank!
/Peter