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Making searches ignore accented characters

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How to allow users to type search queries without using diacritics and still find what they're looking for.

Accent sensitivity

When Index Manager builds an index, it is accent-aware by default. This way, users can search for both accented and unaccented characters and Index Manager will distinguish between them.

Making Index Manager ignore diacritics in search strings

You can, however, make Index Manager ignore accents: 

  1. In Index Manager Settings, open the Advanced tab for the relevant index.
  2. Clear the Make searches accent insensitive checkbox.

When this is enabled, Index Manager will ignore accents when indexing and treat them as regular unaccented characters. It will therefore be possible for a French user, for example, to search both for précipité and precipite and return all matches with or without the accents.

A note to Scandinavian users: The Scandinavian characters æ, ä, ø, ö and å are treated as accented versions of a and o. Therefore, when searching in archives with Scandinavian metadata, it makes sense to retain accent sensitivity (by not selecting Make searches accent insensitive).

  1. Select Save.
  2. Restart the Index Manager service and rebuild the index since it controls how Index Manager interprets the files' metadata at the time the index is built.