[XeTeX] Greek XeLaTeX

Keith J. Schultz keithjschultz at web.de
Tue Oct 12 11:45:49 CEST 2010


Am 12.10.2010 um 10:26 schrieb Philip Taylor (Webmaster, Ret'd):

> If I may address a couple of Ulrike's questions :
> 
> Ulrike Fischer wrote:
> 
>> Also: How will a user of a fully localized format be able to get
>> help from the XeTeX-community?
> 
> Such a user will be able to get help from his/her peers /within/
> the XeTeX community rather than from all of its members, but
> the size of the XeTeX community may grow significantly if the
> current dependence on a basic familiarity with the English
> and American languages can be eliminated.  So there are both
> pros and cons to this approach.
	I agree the big question what would be a sensible approach to
	internationalizing Xe(La)TeX.
	Would it be sensible to add a preprocessor for the most common 
	commands/macros and a selector as \commandlanguage{greek} !
	One could add commands as \commandequiv{German, Kapitel, Chapter}
	or the like to facilitate parsing and internationalizing across packages.

> 
>> How will such a user be able to give
>> something back to the XeTeX-community by writing a package?
> 
> What is the problem ?  Why should all packages have to use
> English or American as the basis of their markup ?  Is it
> not time to throw off this linguistic imperialism and allow
> all the peoples of the world to express themselves in their
> mother tongues when writing XeTeX (or other computer-related)
> documents ?
	It may be new, but there is no imperialism. In the computing world
	there is a bias towards the English language. There have been many
	attempts to create programming languages using other human languages
	other than english. The fact is they simply did not become popular.
	In other words they failed to develop a large enough user base.

regards
		Keith.



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