S with cedilla

I've added the author, Stefan Augustin Doinas.
Both "s" have a cedilla.
On my computer the name looks like it has a diamond with a question mark before each "s."
Is that how it looks for the rest of you?

Interesting asides.

While the Doinas touchstone initially appeared, it has since disappeared.

I cannot find Doinas in Search, (but could by Augustin or through the entry in my library).

I imported the author name directly from Library of Congress.

The picture credit which was cut and pasted from Wikipedia kept the S with cedilla.

Instead of a touchstone, here's the URL.
http://www.librarything.com/author/doinasstefanaugustin&norefer=1

Hi DromJohn,

It's a matter of page encoding - it could happen that you need to display the webpage in another language code, that means, going up in the browser menu (for example "view / character encoding" if you use firefox) and change there to eastern european or similar.

As library thing is an english page, the browser won't know that he has to change the encoding to some other language.

well, in the meantime i saw the same problem with Doinas' name... it is really misterious why librarything shows it wrong (with some question marks at the special signs in his name.

A browser using Unicode (which by 2008 should be every browser, FWIW) should not have any issues. It looks like DromJohn had some issues on his end because the encoding of that name is wrong.

ş

Ş

The strange character which may be shown as a question mark in a diamond is Unicode character FFFD, which means "character whose value is unknown or unrepresentable in Unicode".

thanks Darsu! it's clear.

now I have the following problem: I found TWO AUTHORS that are in fact the same, both are Stefan Augustin Doinas, but one of them is spelled wrong - with those mentioned problems in the name (see up in this topic).

Now it is necessary to combine the two authors to a single one. How do we do this? I could not find any option...
(just for combining works, but not for authors...)

Combining doesn't work here, I just tried from both entries. The wrongly spelt Doinas has no books to his name, Doinaş has one. I don't know whether it will self-correct/self-delete (with the help of one of the household scripts of LT), but I guess not, since there is a disambiguation note and a forum link on the author page of the wrong Doinas (my guess is that once a database entry has connections to other database items it won't be deleted). Maybe just remove the disambiguation notice and the touchstone in the first message HERE and wait for a few days for the script to have a try. Otherwise an e-Mail to Tim et. al might help (if they have the time to get to it).

thanks for your detailed message, Girl from Ipanema!
I thought of completing the "canonical name" identically to all the authors with the Doinas name, so that perhaps this helps...

BTW, my orginal uploading was straight from a Library Congress Catalog Number.

There is some cr@p coming in from catalogues as well, not only amazon. When *they* got the encoding wrong, there is nothing LT can do about it. I always check my new entries, but if one is doing a mass upload that is (understandably) not an easy option.

#8: The canonical name is not used for anything at the moment. There are plans for that, but right now entering the correct name there is purely "informational".

Yes, it's clear that the wrong signs in our case (Stefan Augustin Doinas) originate in the Library of Congress.
Interesting is that in the meantime I discovered how to "unify" authors, and COULD do it for two of the "alter-egos" of St.A.Doinas, but for the third one (the one we here debate) it was impossible.
From some reason, the LT server send back the massage (or message) that "this author is no longer in the database" or similar, instead of melting it to the other two egos.