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Comment by halper | Hacker News Reader

It drives me mad when various forms sternly requires me to enter my name "as it is spelled in the passport" only to tell me that my name is "invalid" or "incorrect" or "not allowed". Then we have the systems that have non-standard transliteration rules …

I have never been known by more than one name, but the spelling sure differs.

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It's annoying that airlines writes "as spelled in passport", when what they really need is an upper case alpha-only version of your name.

But it is also equally annoying that passports don't clearly spell out a "international and systems compatible" version of your name.

We've had Airlines for way over half a century, and visas for about as long as we have had passports and people still walk around with international identification documents that cannot be understood by travel and immigration agencies internationally.

What they probably mean is the name as it’s spelled in the MRZ (the ‘Machine Readable Zone’, the two lines at the bottom of the passport), which is also stored in data group 1 in the embedded chip. Passports can also contain the full name in UTF-8 in data group 11, but this is an optional field.

The MRZ can only contain the characters A-Z (uppercase), 0-9 and <. ICAO document 9303-3 describes conventions for transliteration of other characters into this limited character set.

> But it is also equally annoying that passports don't clearly spell out a "international and systems compatible" version of your name.

They do in the machine readable area. Maybe not "clearly".

The passport machine area replaces Ö with O but most German airlines replace Ö with OE.

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