zlacker

>>notok+(OP)
Interesting article, I've had some similar (though significantly less severe) experiences with having ä and ß in my names, it seems many U. S. companies are just unwilling/incapable of going beyond ASCII.

The government being this sloppy at getting accents right is surprising, I would expect them to value accuracy and a clean paper trail when handling names.

http://archive.today/5h4v2

>>c0balt+G6
The USA government can't even handle ü. I was filling out a simple form to replace my damaged passport. I live in Zürich but it couldn't handle the umlaut. I never know what to do in this situation - do I use 'ue' instead, which is most common in Europe, or do I just use 'u' which is wrong but usually works in America. I didn't even bother checking with 'ue' and just went with 'u'

Ü isn't even a special character or utf-8 - ü is part of ascii. How does this even fail? Is their database a 7-bit database?

>>comrad+3b
ü is not part of ascii. Are you thinking of latin-1?

>>immibi+5f
Oh that makes sense. ASCII is 7-bit. so they could be depending on old 7-bit databases.

>>comrad+8g
No, they can only use what shows up on the keyboard. Internally the software is a vast mix of systems that in practice can probably handle unicode just fine by now. It's just that the people can't type any of those characters.

>>db48x+Sj
Option plus u on US English keyboard on macOS gives you the umlaut, and then hit u again and you have ü.

But I wouldn’t bother memorising that and every other possible way that the other person has to press the keys depending on their keyboard layout and operating system. I’d just tell people to put u instead.

>>Quantu+Pq
You can’t expect a bureaucrat to know about that kind of thing! If it’s not printed on a key right in front of their nose then no government employee is going to be able to type it in.

But that’s not really the point. No matter how many keyboard shortcuts the clerk at the DMV memorizes there is always going to be some text that they just cannot reproduce accurately. Whether it’s an accented character from the exotic land of Spain or some real Zalgo, something is going to get lost. No individual human can correctly deal with all possible textual forms.