Language support finished
LibraryThing now provides good support for the familiar—to many—non-English diacriticals such as é and ñ and gamely handles the exotic—to many—ones like č and å. The encoding is now "UTF-8" so, in theory, is should be able to handle a much wider variety of scripts, but neither Amazon nor the Library of Congress transmit material in non-Latin scripts, so you'll have to type it yourself for now.
LibraryThing is now ready to start adding foreign libraries, and that is high on my list of goals. I shall also see if I can get Amazon Japan working.
Everything should be good going forward. The trick was getting all the old material into shape. LibraryThing-ers had employed all manner of tricks to get diacriticals to work, and some of that editing was hard to detect and correct for. Again, French, Spanish and German books should be fine, but I'm not so sure about the Georgian books languagehat entered. (In this case, my Mac simply won't show Georgian, so I couldn't tell anyway.)
The other gap is material entered between 8pm and 1am. I shut down book editing and tried to process everything coming in, but at almost 1,000 books/hr, a delay of thirty seconds between processes may have left some books "half cooked."
LibraryThing is now ready to start adding foreign libraries, and that is high on my list of goals. I shall also see if I can get Amazon Japan working.
Everything should be good going forward. The trick was getting all the old material into shape. LibraryThing-ers had employed all manner of tricks to get diacriticals to work, and some of that editing was hard to detect and correct for. Again, French, Spanish and German books should be fine, but I'm not so sure about the Georgian books languagehat entered. (In this case, my Mac simply won't show Georgian, so I couldn't tell anyway.)
The other gap is material entered between 8pm and 1am. I shut down book editing and tried to process everything coming in, but at almost 1,000 books/hr, a delay of thirty seconds between processes may have left some books "half cooked."
posted by Tim at 1:42 AM
16 Comments:
I'm eagerly waiting for those additional libraries! The Finnish national library database FENNICA would of course my preference - you will find information about it here:
http://www.lib.helsinki.fi/english/libraries/fennica.htm
My second choice would be LIBRIS, the Swedish national library database. Its search interface (I could not locate a concise library info page) is here:
http://websok.libris.kb.se/websearch/form?lang=eng
PS Thanks for LibraryThing - it's something I've really been waiting for!
The language support fixes you've made work wonderfully in catalog.php (e.g., now José Saramago!), but unfortunately do not in the 'author cloud' (e.g., now José Saramago).
I also cannot search my library by 'José', 'Jose', or even 'Joé' to bring up any results. Only names without any diacritics will receive results.
Perhaps this might be something small which I am doing wrong. I am making the 'é' using the alt+130 method, but should that make a difference?
1. I fixed the author cloud.
2. Yes, searching will be an issue. Give me a day or two on that. I'm going to add a "search" tab to expose the functionality more. In the process I'm going to rethink how search works technically. I'll address the accents issue when I do so.
Tim
Also, I had a tag written in Greek letters, and now that tag is mangled. It's only one, so I'll edit it manually, but FYI.
For Spanish books, please take into account the Spanish National Library (http://www.bne.es/esp/catalogos.htm) and the Spanish ISBN (http://www.mcu.es/bases/spa/isbn/ISBN.html)
Within the last minute or so, I noticed that the acute-e and acute-u have both died. (For some reason, the acute-o is still intact. It's a hardy little critter.)
You're still working on the language support, perhaps?
While I'm asking for three impossible things before breakfast... I don't suppose there's any possibility of getting macron diacritics to indicate long vowels in Japanese? There are of course four other ways of transliterating long vowels, but macrons are by far the nicest. (Well, a gal can hope...)
Forgot to mention that the acute-i is gone, too.
It would be wonderful to have Amazon Japan. I could get in my whole collection of children's books and..... okay, back to work! No hurry, much appreciative of all there is already!
I just tried to add a Cyrillic tag, but it's garbled.
I'm able, now, to add Cyrillic tags. However, when I clicked that tag, the results page's HTML stated "Showing tag "русски�", with the last character as the diamond-?. The records returned the correctly displayed tag, however.
http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?tag=русские
Oh, also, when I search "entire LibraryThing library" for my Cyrillic or Greek tags, it returns 0 results but also says that I'm using the tag.
http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?searchbox=έλληνικά&Search=Search&sau=1&justtags=1
gives "Using the tag: angharad (1)", "viewing 1-0 of 0 books", and "No books cataloged."
Macrons would also be useful for Maori, but I know they can be problematic, and we are used to doing with out.
Looking good!
I'm glad for the language support, though I just want to point out a small glitch. I've added a couple of books in Russian, and now, a day later, it says I share these books with a ton of other users (including myself!) I think what is happening is that something isn't recognising the characters as being different, and the program is finding "matches" in other books with foreign scripts.
German database:
http:dnb.ddb.de
Is Amazon Japan working? I notice it in the list now, but when I search on isbn nothing comes up (but if I search manually at the webpage they're there).
Dear librarything,
We still have problems with the accents in portuguese.
Imagine the title Memórias (memoirs).
You cannot find the book either entering "Memórias" or "Memorias".
thanks
gaspari
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