To umlaut or not to umlaut in titles – accents on foreign language letters

[thesilentowl]

I live close to an Ikea and am amazed at how many times I can find their merchandise at second hand shops still in their original packaging/never used. Because they are a Swedish company, the names of their products are in that language. Those names often have accents that resemble German umlauts. I recently typed in the name of a product both with and without those characters and received different results on my laptop and phone. My concern is that some operating systems may not handle different accents well and completely ignore/omit any titles with certain letters such as “Ä”. Has anyone had any experience dealing with this? For now, I will just put accented and accent-free versions of the names in the listing. Thanks in advance, John PS: Is there anyway to search the forum for various topics?

[antarestar]

I agree, put both versions of the word in the title with the umlaut version at the end of the title since we’ve been told something about Cassini not liking non-alphanumeric characters and I’m not sure if an umlaut counts.

[MDC Galleries & Fine Art]

Yes there are two ways to search but they are a little dicey. One the side bar here on the forum if you scroll down you will come across two white boxes. One says Search the Blog [older threads] and another box that says Search the Forums [Newer threads]. Just type in your keywords.

Another way and clunky also is if you are using a pc you can hold down the control key and type the letter F [this stands for Find]. A search bar appears across the bottom of your screen and you can type in a topic or key word there, then I select “Highlight All” and the key words you typed will be found and highlighted.

The reason it is rudimentary is that you will have to scroll down the page / topic from top to bottom and watch for the highlighted keyword and just stop and read it as you find them. It presents everything that has that keyword in it.

Also this was a blog at one time and those threads are separate from the forum threads.You have to experiment a little bit to see what works best for you.

Hopes this helps a little.

Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art

[Jay]

We just type it in normal lettering. I bet 99.9% of people don’t know how to even type an umlaut. If you have extra characters to fill in your title, it cant hurt to use the umlaut though.

And as Mike said, there’s a search field on the sidebar about halfway down the page.

[thesilentowl]

Thanks for the quick answers. Not sure how I missed the search boxes. They are pretty clear/obvious now.

[Antique Frog]

thesilentowl, have you tried walking into the Ikea store through the exit and past the cash registers in the wrong direction? In some stores it’s a short cut to the reduced items (display models, damaged goods etc).

One thing about Ikea, the room settings here in the UK are furnished with piles of new books in Swedish. Presumably the Swedish stores have books in Hungarian.

[thesilentowl]

Antique Frog: I have hit the clearance section by the registers several times. Over here though, they have the registers set up to double as barricades. Once you have checked-out, there is no going back. This isn’t really a problem as I always hit the cafeteria when I am there. There are several semi-hidden shortcuts through the store, and once you learn them, it is not much of a trek to the registers.
I have seen the Swedish language books used as props around the store. Not sure if they are available for sale.
Thanks for taking the time to respond and offering the suggestion.

[Antique Frog]

Right, here in the UK at Nottingham the registers are open, and there’s a couple of self-service ones with a supervisor, who’s just keeping an eye on the customers scanning. The one at Coventry is so weirdly set up that I’ve no real idea of the layout- it’s an IKEA upended into a tower block with escalators and lifts. I suppose the semi-hidden shortcuts involve rope ladders!

[Author]

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