Orbis and foreign keyboard

[Karla Huebner <karlahuebner () compuserve ! com>]

I finally got around to trying Orbis now that I am using the new 
beta. While it is pretty exciting, I immediately ran into some peculiar issues.

First off, I normally have NB set to use its Czech keyboard as this 
is easier for mixed Czech and English typing. Unfortunately, if there 
is an asterisk key on that keyboard, I haven't found it (will have to 
take a look at a physical Czech keyboard one of these days). This 
means that to in order to search for any root word with varied 
endings (normal in Orbis but especially crucial for Czech text), I 
seem to have to insert an asterisk into a document and then paste it 
into my Orbis query.

Fine, if cumbersome, but for some reason this doesn't always work. I 
tried doing a search on Pirk* for practice, because I could already 
see that I had numerous variants on the spelling of Svata(va) 
Pirkova-Jakobson's name, and Orbis claimed there was nothing whatever 
to be found. As i haven't done very many searches, I don't know if 
there is any commonality among those wherein the asterisk failed to 
do its job. Sometimes it works just fine.

Another issue came up when I was looking at the name Styrsky (hacek 
on S, long second y), which occurs thousands of times in my notes. 
Orbis certainly pointed out that I had frequently mistyped this name, 
so there were a lot of things like Stzrsky, Styrky, Styrksy, etc. 
These naturally had to be fixed if I was going to catch them in an 
asterisked search beginning Styrsk*, which would catch the correct 
forms like Styrskeho and Styrskym. In the course of dealing with 
that, I discovered that Orbis usually but not always displays the 
S-hacek. In other words, I would see "tyrsky" in Orbis, but when I 
went to correct it, would find that there was nothing whatsoever 
wrong with it. This was really baffling, and disturbing.

I think that's it for problems discovered thus far, other than that S 
with a hacek still alphabetizes as if that letter didn't exist. At 
least I am used to that problem in NB, although it is very annoying 
for bibliographies.

Suggestions? Comments?


Karla Huebner