> 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