Dear Zopistas, dear Michel, I have some thoughts on splitting text, mainly out of my experience with Chinese texts. 1. The handling of text should depend on some language tagging, similar to HTML4. This ensures that multilingual documents can be treated correctly. For backward compatibility, the default (in absence of a language tag) could be English, and of course the acquisition methods should be used to provide reasonable easy ways for multilingual sites to define the language once and be done with. 2. So far, automatic splitting algorithms have been able to reach 70-90% accuracy, depending on the type of texts, vocabulary and the day of the week. There are some systematic problems, that make it unlikely to see a 100% solution. Even the very good Chasen for splitting Japanese, which is used in JSplitter can not split Japanese with 100% accuracy. The bottomline of this is, there is a need to leave a door open for human intervention in finetuning the splitting. I would therefore think in the direction of a preprocessor to the splitter, that inserts spaces at places it thinks ok to split. This should be done upon importing text in Zope or upon the first save in edits of new text. People working with the texts could then finetune the splitting to avoid blunders. The Zope splitter could then happily just split at the spaces as usual. Of course, depending on the language settings, these spaces should be filtered out before the text is presented in normal view. 3. A completely different approach would be to forget about splitting and just index into every Asian character. Jim Breen employed this method in his Japanese-English dictionary EDICT (). This allows efficient retrieval of arbitrary strings. I am not sure however, how this would adopt to the kind of dynamic indexing required in Zope. All the best, Christian Dr. Christian Wittern Chung-Hwa Institute of Buddhist Studies 276, Kuang Ming Road, Peitou 112 Taipei, TAIWAN Tel. +886-2-2892-6111#65, Email chris@ccbs.ntu.edu.tw