Re: [Maposmatic-dev] [PATCH 3/6] Add by-letter maps pagination

[Jeroen van Rijn]

On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 18:40, David MENTRE <address@hidden> wrote:
> but maybe we need some experiments to see what we obtain with
> currently available maps.

I think that sounds like a good plan, and I agree that it's best to
get some kind of pagination in place, then improve on that later.
There is probably a number of character ranges that will almost always
work well.

Consider the most used letters in French are not the same as the most
frequently used ones in English, and it would appear that dividing the
ranges based on any single language might be foolish. One could
probably make or find statistics of the number of words in each letter
in each of English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, average the
results, and come up with 8 or 10 groups that are going to be useful
for the majority of users most of the time. ;)

That is you'll find lots of words start with E, but lots with L too,
where E in English might contain 9% of the letters and 11% in French.
Figure this out for all letters for those 5 languages based on public
domain dictionaries (or heck, parsing some big corpus of text in those
languages), and it will probably turn out that of all your maps at
least 5% are likely to fall under E any given time, so the character
range E falls in should not have many more other letters. The
resulting list would still get crowded.

That's an entertaining experiment for another day... like Maxime said:
release soon, release often

-- 
"Just think how stupid the average person is, and then realize that half of them
are even stupider!"
--George Carlin