Wrong sorting of German umlauts

[Daniel Egner]

There are three ways to deal with the umlauts in alphabetic sorting.

1. Treat them like their base characters, as if the umlaut were not present (DIN 5007-1, section 6.1.1.4.1). This is the preferred method for dictionaries, where umlauted words ("Füße", feet) should appear near their origin words ("Fuß", foot). In words which are the same except for one having an umlaut and one its base character (e.g. "Müll" vs. "Mull"), the word with the base character gets precedence.
2. Decompose them (invisibly) to vowel plus e (DIN 5007-2, section 6.1.1.4.2). This is often preferred for personal and geographical names, wherein the characters are used unsystematically, as in German telephone directories ("Müller, A.; Mueller, B.; Müller, C.").
3. They are treated like extra letters either placed
   1. after their base letters (Austrian phone books have ä between az and b etc.) or
   2. at the end of the alphabet (as in Swedish or in extended ASCII).

Either add an option so users can select their preferred sorting scheme or change the existing one to variant 1. This would lead to an order as follows:

AaÄäBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoÖöPpQqRrSsßTtUuÜüVvWwXxYyZz

[Richard Corner]

Thank you for that information. I have an update nearing release which sorts according to the first scheme you list.

Richard.