[tex-live] language, lang, la (was: testing TL'08)

Mojca Miklavec mojca.miklavec.lists at gmail.com
Mon Jun 16 09:32:04 CEST 2008


On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 9:02 AM, Robin Fairbairns wrote:
> Heiko Oberdiek wrote:
>
>> On Sun, Jun 15, 2008 at 07:09:46PM -0500, Karl Berry wrote:
>>
>> >     It would really be a good thing if TeX Live could
>> >     have a clear naming policy for languages.
>> >
>> > I can appreciate IETF tags as the reference, but I confess I don't see
>> > where such a policy would apply,
>>
>> To give programs like `texdoc' a chance to find documentation
>> in the right language (e.g. "LANG=de texdoc foobar" should find
>> foobar in German if available otherwise in the original (English?)
>> language.)
>
> yes.  you're using an iso 639-1 tag there -- i thought the question was
> "what do ietf tags gain us over iso 639?".

They are probably equal concerning the two-letter code, at least on
the top level.

A few cases that we had to use to refer to the proper hyphenation
patterns were these for example:
- el-polyton, el-monoton: polytonic and monotonic greek
- sr-Cyrl, sr-Latn: Serbian as written in Cyrillic and Latin scipt
- de-1901, de-1996: German before and after the spelling reform
- (could be) de-CH: German in Switzerland

But for the sake of finding the right documentation, I don't think
that spelling reform makes any difference to German readers that want
to find the right manual, or that Latin/Cyrillic version of manual
makes too much difference to Serbian readers who can read both. It
makes a difference in using the right hyphenation patterns, but not
for docs.

Mojca


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