[XeTeX] Greek XeLaTeX

[Ulrike Fischer]

Am Tue, 12 Oct 2010 09:26:01 +0100 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, 

What does this help when he/she has a problem with graphicx or
hyperref or fontspec or expl3 or ... where all the internal
code/documentation is in english? 

> 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.
 
>> 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 ?  

They don't need to. There exist e.g. french or german packages. Also
I wrote that it is ok to write a class which defines localized
commands for e.g. \section or itemize etc. But I doubt that it is
useful to localize everything down to optional argument like [c],
units like pt or mm, numbers, all user commands from the latex
format or even in every package. Who should maintain all this
different formats? And who should adapt the packages? 

> 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 ?

Well I'm german, so I don't think that one can accuse me of english
linguistic imperialism. Also in the past I have written some private
german based styles and I ended with documents which used a sort of
TeX-pidgin, a mix of german and english commands. I haved learned
from this experience that standard command names and interfaces even
if they are in a different language than my mother tongue have their
value. 

 
>> To quote from the genesis: "And the Lord said, Behold, the people is
>> one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and
>> now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined
>> to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language,
>> that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord
>> scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth:
>> and they left off to build the city."
 
> You might at least have quoted the /beginning/ of Verse 9 :
 
> "[9] Therefore is the name of it called Babel" :-)

Well and the babel package is a good demonstration of the
difficulties when using various languages and scripts in a document.
Do you think one should add this difficulties to formats and
packages?


-- 
Ulrike Fischer