Re: [Evolution-hackers] How the Contact Card classfied by alphabets?

[Martin Grimme <martin pycage de>]

Am Fr, den 30.01.2004 schrieb Yong Sun um 13:01:
> I have a problem to fix in addressbook. In China (I think also in JK),
> poeple's name is different to Westen's, e.g., maybe someone's name is
> 张三, it's phonetic (or PINYIN) is "zhang san". If I push the button "Z",
> I want to show 张三's information. 
> 
> But the A-Z button not fully valid for Chinese name, some characters
> could be listed correctly according to their PINYIN, yet for other
> characters, they were put to "others" button. 

When you look at the GNOME unicode character map, you can see that
there is information about the PINYIN available for each Chinese
character. Evo could use the same table to find out how to map Hanzi
characters to latin letters.

This would work well for Mandarin, where a character usually has one
pronunciation and it's quite clear how to pronounce a given name.
But I see a problem with Japanese, where characters have different
pronunciations and it's not always clear how to pronounce a given name.

Maybe Evo should support a radical based addressbook for languages with
Chinese characters. There could be a switch for displaying the radical
buttons next to the letter buttons and whoever wants to deal with
Chinese characters enables the additional buttons.
Such an additional button bar could be made available for several other
writing systems as well, e.g. Hangul, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Kyrill, ...


Martin