Why do person names ignore certain unicode characters?

Due to technical limitations from the early days of dblp, names in dblp are restricted to the ISO/IEC 8859-1 (latin-1) character set. This includes characters like ä, é, è ñ, å, ç etc. but not characters like ?, œ, Ž, ... We try to transliterate all person names to latin-1 by substituting unsupported characters with their closest latin-1 match (i.e., "?" as "s", "œ" as "oe", "Ž" as "Z", etc). This is particularly true for the bibliographic meta-data information displayed on our website and the titles of each author page.

However, if we become aware of the full Unicode representation of an author's name, we are now able to add the Unicode name as a note to the author page. Please understand that this is only possible by editing an author record manually, and in most cases we are simply not aware of the true Unicode transcription of a name (e.g., in the context of Asian names).

The following list contains all special characters that are realized in dblp:

À Á Â Ã Ä Å Æ Ç È É Ê Ë Ì Í Î Ï
Ð Ñ Ò Ó Ô Õ Ö Ø Ù Ú Û Ü Ý Þ ß
à á â ã ä å æ ç è é ê ë ì í î ï
ð ñ ò ó ô õ ö ø ù ú û ü ý þ ÿ
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