Hacker News Reader

Comment by kergonath | Hacker News Reader

> Because cote, coté, côte and côté are all different words with the same upper-case representation COTE.

The last bit is wrong, at least in French. The upper case representation of “côté” is “CÔTÉ”. It infuriates me to no end that Microsoft does not accept that letters in caps keep their accents. I can believe that it might be language-dependent, though.

Also, a search engine that does not find “œuf” when you type “oe” is broken.

Very interesting article, though. I wish more developer were aware of this.

View on HN

>It infuriates me to no end that Microsoft does not accept that letters in caps keep their accents.

That behaviour is actually locale-dependant in Microsoft apps. Setting Microsoft Word to "French (Canada)" uses accented capitals, while "French (France)" does not.

I imagine there's a lively internal debate about the latter. France's Académie Française actually says the behaviour you'd prefer is the proper one, but the local typographic culture is heavily influenced by a history of typewriter use where such accents weren't available.

Hooray! Somebody who knows about the different capitalization rules between Québec and France!

There are dozens of us! Dozens! ;-)

there are no differences in this case though, you're supposed to accentuate when you capitalize in France as well

Ha. Maybe you guys should use the French Canadian search engine!

I must admit I’ve never tried to set it to Canadian French. I’m not surprised that the standards might be higher. Also, there’s a box to tick somewhere to set it to a sane behaviour. It’s just the default, which needs to be changed every time, which nobody bothers to do.

There isn’t any debate really, in the sense that virtually nobody remotely interested in typesetting advocates for unaccented caps. All the french books on typography and spelling emphasise that accents change the meaning of words and that they should be kept, provided that you have a device that supports them. It’s just an urban legend amplified by stupid defaults in commonly-used applications.

Right, I’m going to stop ranting now :)

I blame the school system which somehow convinced some people that dropping accents from capital letters is okay. It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

In uni, for the typography class, the learning material had a nice capital "PALAIS DE CONGRES" on the first page, suggesting a building full of eels.

Google Chrome also ignores accents when searching from pages, very annoying.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com