we use OJS in spanish and catalan which are language that uses tildes, and this seems to be a probkem in authors index page because some Authors Lastname begins with a tilde.
the authors list from database are correct and well ordered but when it is printed from template the same character with or without character (A, Á for example) are consider diferent so words with the same Initial character were split and you can fine title “A” with some autors, then title “Á” with some more authros and then title “A” again.
we have had the similar problem and wrote a small piece of code about it.
The problem is that for each author last name, OJS checks whether it begins with the same letter as the previous one (based on an alphabetical list from the database). If they are not the same, a new heading is created. Because A and Á are two different letters, a new heading is created.
To avoid this, we need to tell OJS in which cases a new heading should not be created, so that there are groups of letters to be treated as if they were the same. Those groups need to be defined by a string, which we suggest could be saved in the localization files (which would make sense, as it could respect language specific usage of letters and diacritica).
You can find our piece of code in GitHub, but the conversation with OJS developers stopped after some modifications. Still, you are free to use this code, as it is in production use on our OJS sites. To do this, you will need file system or shell access to your OJS server.
@pir, our longer term plans are to avoid disambiguating authors by name if at all possible. We’ll be working with tools more like ORCiD to provide stronger disambiguation that makes fewer assumptions.
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team