Automatically substitute German special characters in Calibre?

[manawydan]

I have German titles in my database.

In German you often have ä, ö, ß etc. You can write them ae, oe, ss if you do not have the German settings.

However if you search for e.g. Maerchen (fairy tales) in Calibre it ignores Märchen and vice versa.
When adding German titles they come in with ä or ae depending on their original data.

Can I tell Calibre to automatically convert all ä to ae, all ö to oe, all ß to ss and so on?
For new entries and/or existing ones?

Would it be possible to tell Calibre to treat each ö entered in a search as oe? And the same for ä, ß etc.?
I can of course stick to one way of spelling but it sometimes happens by accident.

Sorry if this is has been asked previously but neither Google nor the search here came up with an answer.
If it had already been answered a link to the thread would be greatly appreciated.

[kovidgoyal]

If you want searches with unaccented letters to match their accented equivalents, set the calibre interface language to english. Then searching for Marchen will match both Märchen and Marchen.

[ichbindasauge]

I don't think that would help him. In German we might spell it Märchen or Maerchen, but never Marchen.

[chaley]

There is nothing in specific in calibre that recognizes transliteration of single characters to doublets. The ICU (International Characters for Unicode) package that calibre uses can handle some conversions of single characters to others, for example Š to S, but I don't think it handles any single to double character conversions such as ß to ss or ä to ae.

This limitation is not going to change.

[manawydan]

Oh, pity.
I thought there might be a plug in or script trick.
The language already is English.
So, the only way to handle it is a frequent search and replace, right?

Hm, actually it is not.
Just checked with title .. it finds "ae" ok but it does not recognise "ä". Same for ß (comes up with all titles containing a double s).
Hmpf.