[Koha] Russian Language characters in public catalog

[le-grex]

Am 25.01.20 um 00:03 schrieb :
> Hi all,

Hi,

> 
> This is perhaps more of a general web design problem than a Koha-specific
> one but I'm wondering if others have had trouble with accented Russian
> characters displaying properly and what their solution was. Here's a search
> of all our Russian language records
> <https://library.cca.edu/cgi-bin/koha/opac-search.pl?advsearch=1&idx=kw&op=and&idx=kw&op=and&idx=kw&limit=ln%2Crtrn%3Arus&sort_by=relevance&do=Search>;
> there's an accent that's a large, sweeping arch over multiple letters
> (sorry, after some research I still don't know its name) which renders as
> blank unicode boxes by fonts that do not support it, e.g. "M. Sarʹi︠a︡n" as
> opposed to how it should look
> <https://www.google.com/search?&q=M.+Sar%CA%B9i%EF%B8%A0a%EF%B8%A1n>.
> 
> The Arial font is so far the only one I've found that renders the accent
> properly, though I assume there are others. Koha theme's NotoSans doesn't
> and neither do any of our institutional brand fonts. Is there anywhere in
> the public catalog display where the record language is shown? Preferably
> as a class or other CSS hook, if I could just do
> `#catalogue_detail_biblio.russian { font-family: arial }` that'd be the
> perfect solution.

I doubt that this is really a russian "accent", because that makes no
sense in this connection. A russian accent would be, i.e. in: Каменский.
The Breve above the и makes the normal и=i to a й=j.

M. Saryan is an armenian painter and so it's armenian name is not
russian/cyrillic but: Մարտիրոս Սարյան according to wikipedia.

The russian transliteration is: Мартирос Сарьян and in latin Martiros
Saryan. Or in a russian dictionary: Мартиро́с Сарья́н with pronounciation
signs.

So if you look at his surname Сарья́н, you see a Я, which is pronounced
"ja" and is in fact a ligature, or was at least, today it's one letter.
The Accent above Я is only a pronounciation hint, but not part of the
original name. Since Сарья́н does also include a ь, a mjagkij snak, which
is not a letter to pronounce, but a sign to change the "hardness" of the
consonant before (here р, which is r).

In short: M. Sarʹi︠a︡n seems just to be a strange, broken transliteration
of these signs. The ' behind the r refers to the ь, since you "can't"
speak it. And the sweeping arches above ian seems to be the rest of the
pronounciation sign above the я́ (ia). But you don't write the
pronounciation signs in russian language (unless it's a dictionary or
similar).

So his latin Name is M. Saryan. Or in russian, М. Сарьян. I would not
expect to see this pronounciation signs in a book search, since they are
not part of his name. But i'm not a Librarian in the way that i know
what the demands of these things are.

> 
> I've been considering how to handle this but nothing other than simply
> switching the whole catalog's font to Arial seems great. I can add some
> JavaScript to change the font on just select pages, but I'd have to tell
> when affected records are appearing and also apply it to search results. I
> could edit all the records to romanize them but would be laborious since I
> don't think there's a way to do a bulk edit that catches every instance of
> the accent. Plus, newly imported records will have the same problem and
> I'll have to keep revisiting them.
> 
> Best,
> 
> ERIC PHETTEPLACE Systems Librarian (he/him)

Sincerely,

grex

> 
> ephetteplace at cca.edu | o 510.594.3660
> 
> 5212 Broadway | Oakland, CA | 94618
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