Re: [Gnumed-devel] Patient whose name (in the public db) is in a different alphabet... Greek to me?

[Sebastian Hilbert]

Am Dienstag 07 Juli 2009 19:15:16 schrieb Karsten Hilbert:
> > > That is a perfectly valid Greek name. Greek keyboards can perfectly
> > > well
> > > enter those characters. For people not having a Greek keyboard but
> > > needing to search for the patient I would recommend googling a greek
> > > text and having the patient cut-n-paste the appropriate letters into
> > > the search box. GNUmed can (should be able) perfectly fine search
> > > for greek names.
> >
> > You are kidding, right?
>
> Not really. "Recommend" was, however, not the suitable word for the
> situation. Personally, I would enter an alias into the nickname field
> (or even add a second transliterated name).
>
> In non-time-critical situations I may, however, *have* to resort
> to the above technique. There's any number of such possibilities
> and some may have to be applied sometimes.
>
> But - non-latin encodings, people, and names are here to stay. We
> need to allow them to be themselves. It's a fact of life which I'm
> sure you do not doubt.
>
> > e.g. I did use Google translate on the characters that I pasted from
> > the name, and I got
> >     Perantoni, Ms Helen (x)
>
> And hopefully no one spelled that "Perentony, Ms Hellen".
> Transliterations are a slippery slope.
>
> > There is a keyboard layout at wikipedia if that would help anyone
> > (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout) whereas handily on the
> > Mac some applications including the Mail application give direct
> > access to the Mac character palette, of which I attach a screenshot
> > with "Greek and Copric" selected:
>
> There's such tools for Windows and Linux as well. I just didn't know
> the names off the top of my head.

One could always hack up a small wxapp that would display and onscreen 
keyboard

Nice small project for python beginners.