Re: people's names in Contacts

On Saturday 02 January 2010, Peter Evans wrote:
> So anyway, I started to type in people's names. They're mostly
> Japanese names, which I type in Japanese script; (English-interface)
> Kontact neither knows how they're pronounced nor asks me. Thus they
> end up listed in no order.

Sorting by pronunciation is an interesting idea thought it makes me 
wonder how to sort the phonemes. With a mix of English and Japanese 
names this might work somewhat, but probably not with other languages.


> I try changing my procedure, moving (say) 中村和子 (whose reading is
> "Nakamura Kazuko", surname first) to a "Custom Field" that I call
> "Printingname", and typing "Nakamura Kazuko" as her name. This way,
> all the names are in order. However, if I just want to SEE how to
> write Nakamura Kazuko properly, it seems that I have to dig down to
> the subpage for "Custom Fields". (Incidentally, typing Japanese
> characters into this Custom Field produces piles of spurious
> characters in addition to those I want; even though typing the same
> characters into the name or address field is fine.)

At least, in China in emails sent to English recipients it appears to be 
common to write the name in Latin characters followed by the name in 
the Chinese script in parenthesis. But I don't know a good way to 
achieve this with Kontact's address book.


> Later I'm going to want to type in anglo names too. Analogous to 中村和子
> and "Nakamura Kazuko" will be "Joe Bloggs" and "Bloggs, Joe"
> respectively -- the latter for neat listing, the former to appear on
> new year cards and the like. This all seems very elementary.

You wrote that you wanted to print the labels with gLabels. Does it read 
addresses (e.g. in vCard format)? If yes, then writing the name as "Joe 
Bloggs" can probably be done in gLabels.


> Do I really have to install the Japanese version just to do something
> so simple? I'd rather not do this, as reading menus, tooltips, etc in
> Japanese threatens to obscure things further. I suspect that I don't
> need this and just am missing something very obvious indeed.

Quite frankly, I have no idea how sorting works in Japanese. If 
Kontact's address book honors the system's sorting order than you might 
try setting the system's sorting order to Japanese and see whether that 
gives better sorting results. To try this run
  export LC_COLLATE=ja_JP.UTF-8
in Konsole (or some other terminal) and then start Kontact from this 
command line via
  kontact


Regards,
Ingo

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