[luatex] Translating TeX (obviously a feature request).

[Khaled Hosny]

On Sun, Aug 01, 2010 at 02:50:51PM +0300, Khaled Hosny wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 01, 2010 at 01:39:23PM +0200, Paul Isambert wrote:
> > I have my doubts about gettext... because I don't know it :) (TeX is the only
> > language, if it is one, in which I can express myself rather clearly.) That's
> > not totally self-centered: TeX is hard enough, and with Lua on top of it  (or
> > below) it already becomes rather specialized, so I'll fear any additional
> > language will make it totally unreachable to most people, and I believe most
> > people should be able to use TeX more or less directly, for instance using
> > plain, and still benefit from what LuaTeX has to offer. So I vote for callbacks,
> > since it seems the easiest way around (a TeX primitive wouldn't be workable, I
> > suppose)and easily customizable by users.
> 
> If you are going to do any moderate sized translation project, you will
> appreciate using standard translation tools and file formats. Also
> gettext is just a C library to help l10n your application, no additional
> language or anything, though I admit it is more complex, code wise, than
> writing some lua code, but that complexity is no where near the
> complexity of maintain translation in a non-standard method. Trust me,
> I've been doing localisation for years and only gettext seems to get it
> right (to the degree that I convert any text I'm to translate to a PO
> file, even plain text).

Also, IIUC, Taco's plain is to just expose error message to lua, how
l10n is handled is left to the user (the package writer or whatever).


-- 
 Khaled Hosny
 Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team
 Free font developer