On Fri, Dec 04, 2009 at 10:17:30AM +0100, Patrick Holthaus wrote: > You cannot simply leave the umlaut out since it is considered as a separate > letter for itself. You cannot choose whether to write an "?" or an "o". Like > Renat said, there are words that completely change their meaning when > exchanging the characters. > > I think this is especially true if it comes to names. While people get used > to > spellings like "Goettingen" for G?ttingen, it looks odd and wrong to Germans. > Like someone who doesn't have the character on the keyboard ;) > Also keep in mind that there are cities that are spelled with "oe" or "ae" by > design. (Soest, Oelde, Aerzen, Oestinghausen etc.) Those cannot be spelled > with an "?" instead. It would simply be wrong.
OK, that settles it :-) It seems the message you folks are trying to pound into my head is that people don't just casually drop the umlauts and accents. That's what was bugging me -- if it is an extra key or weird combinations like in emacs, maybe people would skip it often enough that we would have to allow for that. This is a better answer than I had feared because now I don't have to sweat weird transliterations. There may still be some, but probably not enough to worry about. Now on to other mysteries, like why our (American) customer thinks people in French Guayana (sp?) are going to write "French Guayana" for the country name. Even my thick skull doesn't expect people living in Deutschland (probably spelled wrong too, it is very late in a long and tiring day, so apologies in advance, and if it is correct, apologies for not recognizing that :-) to write "Germany" ... Thanks for not pounding my head too heavily ... -- ... _._. ._ ._. . _._. ._. ___ .__ ._. . .__. ._ .. ._. Felix Finch: scarecrow repairman & rocket surgeon / fe...@crowfix.com GPG = E987 4493 C860 246C 3B1E 6477 7838 76E9 182E 8151 ITAR license #4933 I've found a solution to Fermat's Last Theorem but I see I've run out of room o