Champion
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7.5K Messages
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277K Points
Unicode - 25-year update
IMDb used to have a newsletter, and the mid-April 1997 issue contained an item titled "The Great ISO Swap" reporting that IMDb had implemented the ISO 8859-1 (also known as ISO Latin-1) character set, allowing names and titles to use all the common letters with diacritical marks of the major Western European languages (such as å, ç, é, ï, ñ, ô, and ù).
http://web.archive.org/web/20060101140203/http://www.imdb.com/Newsletter/newsletter-13#iso
Near the end of the item the following statement appeared:
Ideally all data should be presented using its native character sets/ pictograms. Technically this is not possible though with current widespread software for web access, e-mail and operating systems in general.
In the future there will be a new huge standardized 16 bit character set called Unicode. It will offer the capability to freely combine Japanese Kanji with ISO 1 text and Hindi, for example. We will use it as it becomes widely available and supported by the industry.
I note that some additional character sets have been made available for the Alternate Titles section over the last few years (among them Greek, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Cyrillic), and I personally am not that affected by the lack of full Unicode support. However, I know that some contributors here would like to see further progress made in terms of implementing Unicode, so I am bringing this up to mark the 25 years since IMDb announced plans to implement it.
vsrawat
8 Messages
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184 Points
3 years ago
When entire world is moving away from proprietary fonts towards will Unicode, IMDb still strictly bans the use of Unicode characters
What is the reason? How does the use of Unicode character harms the website?
When will Unicode character be allowed to be used at the site?
Thanks.
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J_Potier
1 Message
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60 Points
3 years ago
A good example of the importance of full Unicode support:
The Romanian film "Față în Față" ("Face to Face") becomes "Fata în Fata" on IMDb - "The Girl in the Girl" ! The is also how "Face/Off" is known in Romania, apparently...
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vsrawat
8 Messages
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184 Points
3 years ago
Without Unicode we cannot even use Latin alphabet, and entire astronomy has major use of that. Most of stars have Latin alphabet in their names, so we cannot properly mention the star without Unicode, have to write full name of that Latin letter. There are so many astronomy related movies that would need mention of Latin alphabet.
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tomas_wenigr
4 Messages
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84 Points
2 months ago
It would be great if imdb expanded the character set for writing movie and person names. My name contains the character "š", but on the name page I have "s" instead of this character. In order for my name to be spelled correctly, the character set would have to be extended by at least "Latin Extended-A". I guess I'm not the only one who has a garbled name due to this lack.
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markus_7164959
2 Messages
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70 Points
2 months ago
1
hank_slater
2 Messages
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70 Points
2 months ago
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silverbacknet
4 Messages
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150 Points
2 months ago
1
taewong
12 Messages
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370 Points
2 months ago
48
Maatamun_0303
11 Messages
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290 Points
2 months ago
Dear IMDb.
I am writing to share some observations and suggestions regarding the handling of names on your platform. I have noticed that there are some challenges with the correct representations of names, especially when it comes to diacritical marks and non-Latin writing systems.
For example, if one searches for a person named "Lasse Kvelnes", they are directed to a profile named Lasse Kvalsnes and his real name is only an alternative name but in reality he doesn't seem to have an alternative name. Maybe it would be a good idea to only use "alternative names" for nicknames or abbreviated names. Otherwise this can be confusing and potentially lead to errors. "Zdena Pelikanova" is a twin profile to "Zdenka Pelikanova" using one of her nicknames and according to Czech orthography the name should be written "Zdeňka Pelikánová". The profile "Zdenka Pelikonova" would represent a pronounciation error if it could speak and present itself. This highlights the need for IMDb to upgrade the system to accept the full range of Unicode characters. Moreover, it is difficult for users who are searching for individuals with names written in non-Latin scripts such as Hangul.
I understand that there may be technical limitations that make it difficult to implement full Unicode support. However, I believe that this could be a valuable improvement to your platform, making it more inclusive and user-friendly for an international audience.
I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this suggestion.
Best regards Maatamun
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linyou322
24 Messages
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724 Points
1 month ago
Suggestion: The title can support the two tone letters ā and ē.
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MartinK75
85 Messages
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1.4K Points
27 days ago
I'd like to use the following accented character in a submission: š but it's not on your list of approved accents - can a solution be found?
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