Re: [Evolution] Anoying contact name choices

[Patrick O'Callaghan <poc usb ve>]

On Tue, 2009-06-23 at 21:57 +0200, Eduard Bardaji Puig wrote:
> Hi, right now i have all my contacts as text files, and i decided to
> add them to evo via the contact tools available. however, the choices
> are VERY anoying. I'm spanish, and in spain, people's names are
> typically sorted by what could be considered in the US as the middle
> name. For example, a person who's full name is: name1 name2 name3 ...
> nameN would be typically sorted under "name2" as:   name2 name3 ...
> nameN, name1. (Typically there are only 3 names, but not always) As
> you can understand, this is very anoying since i dont always know off
> the top of my head what the lesser-known last name of a person is. Is
> there any prospect of change on how names are filed/viewed in evo?

Unless *all* of your contacts are going to follow the same convention,
there's no general rule that will always work. The "Full Name" field is
unformatted text so Evo can't know what is the given name, the father's
family name, the mother's family name, an extra given name, etc. etc.
The only way this could be done would be to encode the various parts of
the name as explicit fields, but that's not the schema in use and I
don't know how easy it would be to change.

Parsing names is hard in general. For example, in "MarÃa del Pilar
RodrÃguez de GarcÃa" there are two family names and one given name, but
in "Pedro PÃrez Montilla" there is one given name and two family names,
and in "Josà Pablo JimÃnez" two given names and one family name. It's a
bit much to expect Evo to recognize all these cases.

Meanwhile, since your contacts are in text files, why don't you use the
extensive text manipulation tools on Linux to get them into the form you
want?

poc