As ADABAS uses the ISO 8859/1.2 code for a sort of the alphanumeric characters or character strings, and as national specific characters in this code follow all the other "normal" alphanumeric characters, character strings containing the national special characters would be output at the wrong place according to the usual conventions.
The word 'Änderung', e.g., would be output after the word 'Zeichenkette', or 'Größe' after 'Grund'.
This effect can be resolved using a table for the mapping of codes, MAPCHAR SET (see the CONTROL manual), that ensures a correct sort. In this MAPCHAR SET, another notation can be assigned to the national special characters in such a way that these will be arranged in the desired order when being sorted (see the Reference Manual).
For example, if the alternative notation 'A' is assigned to the character 'Ä', and the function "mapchar" is applied to the sort criterion when reading from the database (see the Reference Manual), the word 'Änderung' will be output before the word 'Anfang'.