[Feature Request] Filter diacritics in help

Question

We’re at a workshop for French-speaking translators and consultants.
Searching for menu items and help in the search box is very helpful in PT9, but it could be more helpful.
For many, French is a second or third language, and so, for example, in Word, Gmail, or Google, they have a habit of typing French text without accents and letting spellcheck add/interpret the accents. Sometimes a minority language keyboard is active when they need to search for help in Paratext.

If I type “Passages”, I get “Passages parallèles”, but if I type “references”, I don’t get anything in French, as the correct spelling is “références”. (I do get several menus that are yet to be translated in Paratext 9.3.)

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Searching “références” gets me everything I would want:

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It would be most helpful if the help found words with and without diacritics, and the user will be more likely to find what they are looking for.

The feature request is to normalize/configure the search so that searching “references” or “références” will autocorrect and find all of the relevant content. I expect that this feature would help other languages, such as Spanish and Portuguese.

~Matthew_Lee, on behalf of Francophone Africa.

Answer 1

Matthew_Lee this is a great suggestion. Feature requests for Paratext should be entered using the Give Feedback feature so that they can be added to the queue.

Comments

This request has been in the Paratext queue for several years: PTX-19293: Help search should ignore accents (Search menus/help)

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While good to know it has been logged in the queue, it is not encouraging to our cause to know it’s been there for several years. Maybe it doesn’t do damage to request it publicly where others can say, Me too!