[kdepim-users] people's names in Contacts

[Peter Evans]

Hello from a newbie. A question about the forms in which to write people's
names.

As I wade through one pile of incoming new year cards with my name and
address mostly printed on and another pile of outgoing new year cards with
my correspondents' names and addresses laboriously handwritten, it occurs
to me that the average Windows user is doing things more efficiently than
I'm doing them in (K)ubuntu. A bit of googling around suggested that the
combination of Kontact and gLabels would do the job next year. I thought
I'd at least start typing people's names, addresses, etc into Kontact,
leading up to superefficiency a year from now.

First problem: When I look for help in Kontact (under Ubuntu) I'm told
"Could not launch the KDE Help Center: Could not find service
'khelpcenter'." Synaptic can't find "khelpcenter" either. I'm literally
helpless. Does help need KDE?

So anyway, I started to type in people's names. They're mostly Japanese
names, which I type in Japanese script; (English-interface) Kontact neither
knows how they're pronounced nor asks me. Thus they end up listed in no
order.

I try changing my procedure, moving (say) 中村和子 (whose reading is
"Nakamura Kazuko", surname first) to a "Custom Field" that I call
"Printingname", and typing "Nakamura Kazuko" as her name. This way, all the
names are in order. However, if I just want to SEE how to write Nakamura
Kazuko properly, it seems that I have to dig down to the subpage for
"Custom Fields". (Incidentally, typing Japanese characters into this Custom
Field produces piles of spurious characters in addition to those I want;
even though typing the same characters into the name or address field is
fine.)

Later I'm going to want to type in anglo names too. Analogous to 中村和子
and "Nakamura Kazuko" will be "Joe Bloggs" and "Bloggs, Joe" respectively
-- the latter for neat listing, the former to appear on new year cards and
the like. This all seems very elementary.

Do I really have to install the Japanese version just to do something so
simple? I'd rather not do this, as reading menus, tooltips, etc in Japanese
threatens to obscure things further. I suspect that I don't need this and
just am missing something very obvious indeed.


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