Searching for «ß» finds «ss» (Affinity Publisher)

[mala]

I'm from Switzerland. We write in German but we usually don't use the letter «ß». Instead we allways use a simple double «ss». 

I often have to change german texts to «our» german. I need to search for all the characters «ß» and replace them with «ss». This should be a simple task but searching for «ß» shows all occurences of «ß» and «ss» at the same time. 

It's not that bad as I can still replace automatically but I would prefer Affinity Publisher to show me only results with the character I'm searching for («ß»)! 

I'm using the english version of Affinity Publisher on an english MacOS with the dictionnary «German (Schweiz, Frami)» (Hunspell). 

 

Short version in german:

Die Suche nach dem scharfen «s» (ß) findet sämtliche Doppel-s im Text.

[loukash]

1 hour ago, mala said:

I'm from Switzerland. We write in German but we usually don't use the letter «ß». Instead we allways use a simple double «ss». 

Ich auch…  

1 hour ago, mala said:

I need to search for all the characters «ß» and replace them with «ss». This should be a simple task but searching for «ß» shows all occurences of «ß» and «ss» at the same time. 

To me, this looks like it's "by design".
I, for one, consider this a feature, not a bug.

1 hour ago, mala said:

I would prefer Affinity Publisher to show me only results with the character I'm searching for («ß»)! 

And you can:
Simply change the search option via the "Formating" cog menu. Limiting the search to just "ß" works with selecting Match Case or Regular Expression. (Mein Affinity läuft auch auf Englisch, ich kenne die deutschen Bezeichnungen nicht.)

[Dan C]

Thanks for your report, @mala!

I can confirm I've been able to replicate this issue here and I'm getting it logged with our developers now.

2 minutes ago, loukash said:

To me, this looks like it's "by design".
I, for one, consider this a feature, not a bug.

The reason I am logging this as a bug is that other applications (such as Word) do not return any results when searching the same text from Publisher, with the Eszett character (ß).

I would personally expect the Find and Replace to only find the exact character being searched for, but I do understand there are some intricacies regarding this character that I may not be aware of, as I'm not a native speaker of German - so I'm happy to pass back any feedback regarding this behaviour to our devs for consideration

[loukash]

3 minutes ago, Dan C said:

other applications (such as Word) do not return any results when searching the same text from Publisher, with the Eszett character (ß).

I haven't touched MS Word et al since 25 years, so I can't comment on that.
But for sure is that TextEdit or Pages on MacOS Ventura do behave the same as Publisher:

So I still stand by my claim that it's a feature.  

6 minutes ago, Dan C said:

there are some intricacies regarding this character that I may not be aware of, as I'm not a native speaker of German

Could be that this is a specific MacOS behavior related to Swiss German language settings:

 

[mala]

6 minutes ago, loukash said:

Ich auch…  

To me, this looks like it's "by design".
I, for one, consider this a feature, not a bug.

And you can:
Simply change the search option via the "Formating" cog menu. Limiting the search to just "ß" works with selecting Match Case or Regular Expression. (Mein Affinity läuft auch auf Englisch, ich kenne die deutschen Bezeichnungen nicht.)

Thanks! This works – though it's a bit strange that «Match Case» should change this behaviour …

As for bug or feature: Just consider the situation where you have to change some of the characters «ß» but not all! Then you have to go through hundreds of hits to find the right ones …

 

@Dan C: Thanks for logging this. In InDesign I can search for «ß» without selecting «Match Case» or RegEx.

[mala]

5 minutes ago, loukash said:

I haven't touched MS Word et al since 25 years, so I can't comment on that.
But for sure is that TextEdit or Pages on MacOS Ventura do behave the same as Publisher:

So I still stand by my claim that it's a feature.  

Could be that this is a specific MacOS behavior related to Swiss German language settings:

Yes, looks like it's something to do with MacOS. But I don't think it's to do with language settings (your primary language is English as is mine and I think that also @Dan C uses english as primary language.

If you uncheck «Ignore Case» in the search of TextEdit only the real Eszetts are found! 

So for me it's a bug in MacOS! Which means that there will probably never be an solution except your workarounds with «Match Case» and RegEx.

[loukash]

On 11/8/2023 at 12:09 PM, mala said:

I don't think it's to do with language settings (your primary language is English as is mine and I think that also Dan C uses english as primary language.

The "Primary language" doesn't affect all language aspects of MacOS, hence the other options there which can be set to "Switzerland".

On 11/8/2023 at 12:09 PM, mala said:

If you uncheck «Ignore Case» in the search of TextEdit only the real Eszetts are found! 

Well…
"Ignore Case" unchecked = "Match Case" checked  
Exactly the same option, just labeled vice versa.

On 11/8/2023 at 12:09 PM, mala said:

So for me it's a bug in MacOS!

I still consider this a feature because we have the option to change the behavior depending on what we need. (Whether Word or Windows behave differently, I have no idea.)
So I, for one, would definitely want Publisher to behave consistently with the default MacOS behavior.

Also, being affected by the "Match/Ignore Case" option is in fact logical because German orthography requires that ß – being a lowercase character – is spelled as SS when uppercase. *) When case is ignored, a contextually smart search considers ß = ss.
Hence also the regex option which then takes characters "literally".

~~~

That all said, there have been many other MacOS bugs related to the Swiss language/keyboard layout settings, going as far back as at least System 7. Given how many times I had to pull my hair out of sheer desperation in the past 30+ years, I should have been bald by now…  

Edited November 9, 2023 by loukash
*) apparently no more, see further below

[Dan C]

1 hour ago, loukash said:

TextEdit or Pages on MacOS Ventura do behave the same as Publisher:

1 hour ago, mala said:

In InDesign I can search for «ß» without selecting «Match Case» or RegEx.

Thanks both for confirming the above - I'll be sure to include this information with the development report.

29 minutes ago, loukash said:

56 minutes ago, mala said:

So for me it's a bug in MacOS!

I still consider this a feature because we have the option to change the behavior depending on what we need. (Whether Word or Windows behave differently, I have no idea.)
So I, for one, would definitely want Publisher to behave consistently with the default MacOS behavior.

I have been testing this issue on Windows, where the same behaviour is seen in Publisher so I don't believe it to be caused by macOS at this time.

Though as above I do understand the desire to allow for this search to be fluid in it's results for this character, so I'll be sure to request that further considerations are made by the team to be certain of the expected behaviour within Affinity.

I hope this helps

[loukash]

6 minutes ago, Dan C said:

on Windows, where the same behaviour is seen in Publisher so I don't believe it to be caused by macOS at this time

Affinity doesn't use the NSText framework so MacOS cannot affect it directly.
However, the global MacOS language settings do have an effect, as already known by all the previously documented (and hopefully fixed?) bugs caused by Affinity's Preferences→General→Language settings…

11 minutes ago, Dan C said:

Though as above I do understand the desire to allow for this search to be fluid in it's results for this character, so I'll be sure to request that further considerations are made by the team to be certain of the expected behaviour within Affinity.

To make the feature/behavior more "transparent", it might be a separate option either in the cog menu, or e.g. in Preferences→General→Text.
Not sure how to name it though: "Smart Language Aware Text Search" or something? 

[Oufti]

1 hour ago, Dan C said:

I do understand the desire to allow for this search to be fluid in it's results for this character, so I'll be sure to request that further considerations are made by the team to be certain of the expected behaviour within Affinity.

I think the same question should be considered for other searches as well, where some will want no difference (Schuss = Schuß) while others would be able to find only specific results: 

smart quotes vs. straight quotes (see this topic) ; common ligatures like ff fi fl ffi ffl ſt st ӕ œ ij

[Dan C]

16 minutes ago, Oufti said:

I think the same question should be considered for other searches as well, where some will want no difference (Schuss = Schuß) while others would be able to find only specific results: 

smart quotes vs. straight quotes (see this topic) ; common ligatures like ff fi fl ffi ffl ſt st ӕ œ ij

I'll be sure to include this in the development log also for consideration, many thanks

[seriku]

5 hours ago, mala said:

I'm from Switzerland. We write in German but we usually don't use the letter «ß». Instead we allways use a simple double «ss». 

I often have to change german texts to «our» german. I need to search for all the characters «ß» and replace them with «ss». This should be a simple task but searching for «ß» shows all occurences of «ß» and «ss» at the same time. 

It's not that bad as I can still replace automatically but I would prefer Affinity Publisher to show me only results with the character I'm searching for («ß»)! 

I'm using the english version of Affinity Publisher on an english MacOS with the dictionnary «German (Schweiz, Frami)» (Hunspell). 

 

Short version in german:

Die Suche nach dem scharfen «s» (ß) findet sämtliche Doppel-s im Text.

 

3 hours ago, loukash said:

Ich auch…  

To me, this looks like it's "by design".
I, for one, consider this a feature, not a bug.

And you can:
Simply change the search option via the "Formating" cog menu. Limiting the search to just "ß" works with selecting Match Case or Regular Expression. (Mein Affinity läuft auch auf Englisch, ich kenne die deutschen Bezeichnungen nicht.)

As @mala has explained rules on when to use ß and ss vary across the countries where German is spoken.

Where countries use both, ß and ss, this is also a cause of spelling mistakes.

From my point of view, finding all occurrences of ss and ß when searching for either is helpful as this is more tolerant when writers/editors make mistakes; in particular as Match case and regular expressions provide everything that's required to adjust the results. 

If this functionality were to go, I'dconsider it useful to provide a way of switching it on in areas, where German uses both ss and ß.

[Oufti]

3 hours ago, Oufti said:

smart quotes vs. straight quotes (see this topic)

I forgot the link to the relevant topic:

 

[loukash]

Also an often forgotten search method:
The ability to temporarily convert text into Unicode (Text→Toggle Unicode, APu only) and then search for the exact codes. Then toggle back.

Speaking of which, there is a bug in v2.2.1 (or even earlier?) where U+2029 is not being toggled back to the invisible Paragraph Separator character.

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, loukash said:

The ability to temporarily convert text into Unicode (Text→Toggle Unicode, APu only) and then search for the exact codes. Then toggle back.

That only works for text that you have Selected, or for the single character at the cursor position.

But you could use that to find the Unicode value for the character at the cursor (or look it up in the Glyph Browser) where you'd see that  ß is U+00df and you could then do a reg-ex search for \x{00df} to find all of that character, and nothing else.

[Hangman]

I may be completely missing something here but on macOS Monterey using the German Dictionary if I do a search for the Eszett character in Publisher it only finds instances of «ß» and not «ss» unlike Pages and Text Edit...

[loukash]

33 minutes ago, Hangman said:

using the German Dictionary

I was also thinking that this could/should have an effect but in my own quick test I was using the default Latin placeholder text wth a few random ß and ss thrown in. I didn't dig in any further.

As a side note: I actually read the content of your example text and was surprised that there now is an official uppercase Eszett. I didn't know that. (And frankly, being based in Switzerland, I don't necessarily have to care. )

[Hangman]

15 minutes ago, loukash said:

As a side note: I actually read the content of your example text and was surprised that there now is an official uppercase Eszett. I didn't know that.

Here's a link to the full article if it's of interest though as you say being based in Switzerland, you don't necessarily have to care.

https://qz.com/1033265/germanys-century-long-debate-over-a-missing-letter-in-its-alphabet

[mala]

2 hours ago, Hangman said:

I may be completely missing something here but on macOS Monterey using the German Dictionary if I do a search for the Eszett character in Publisher it only finds instances of «ß» and not «ss» unlike Pages and Text Edit...

It's not the dictionary. Please see if you have «Match Case» checked in the cog wheel menu. 

[Hangman]

5 minutes ago, mala said:

It's not the dictionary. Please see if you have «Match Case» checked in the cog wheel menu.

I inadvertently had «RegEx» checked though not «Match Case». Set to «Normal» at it finds «ß» and not «ss»...

[mala]

As @loukash pointed out in an earlier post: You can either check «Match Case» or «RegEx». Then a search for «ß» does not find «ss». Otherwise it does even when using the standard german dictionary: