Improve diacritics in sierra to search Arabic and other Semitic langauges
Improve diacritic searching in Sierra to include Semitic languages, especially Arabic! We have a fair number of Arabic books in out collections, and a large Arabic community, but Sierra support for Arabic characters does not seem complete. We often find that Arabic letters in Sierra is replaced by a white square, which seems to mean that the character is not supported. The names appear fine in Vega but the non supported letters do not seem to be indexed in the search results. This is an important language for members of our community and support for it is important in our library.
Mary Horman
shared this idea
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Kimberly Allen
commented
Also, my institution uses a custom Blacklight installation instead of Vega for discovery. Attached is a paper explaining issues we ran into with Arabic scripts. It may provide insight into the issues you are seeing.
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Kimberly Allen
commented
For the Sierra client, the white square issue can sometimes be helped by updating the preferred languages in Windows. In win11: Language settings ->Preferred Languages. Install the relevant language. Reboot Windows and see how it goes.
