[XeTeX] Localized XeLaTeX: was Greek XeLaTeX

Tobias Schoel liesdiedatei at googlemail.com
Thu Oct 14 13:07:27 CEST 2010


Hi,

having seen the examples for \section in different scripts I am more 
than respectful for people, whose mother tongue is written in a script 
other than latin (greek-cyrillic). (I myself have only lived in the 
"latin" world plus half a year in China.): I couldn't effeciently read 
any markup in these languages because I can't effciently make out the 
differences in the symbols and thus identify them.

Consequently, the need for localisations seems all the more important to me.

An interface, which translates the commands isn't really WYSIWYG, 
because markup will be appiled by compiling not by viewing. But it's 
also not what-you-see-is-what-you-typed resp. 
what-you-see-is-what-is-there. But is this really the important bit? 
Shouldn't it be more:

what-you-see-is-what-you-think

Being German by language, I have no problem reading, writing and 
thinking in (simple) English after years of learning. But what about 
those from other scripts or language families?

It'd be a real help, I think, if they could write markup in the way they 
think. (language-conform, script-confom, directionality-conform)
But it'd awful for others to read it.

An interface seems more appropriate than pre-post-duringruntime-processors.

bye

Toscho

Am 14.10.2010 12:39, schrieb Keith J. Schultz:
>
> Am 13.10.2010 um 19:27 schrieb Mojca Miklavec:
>
>> On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 12:57, Keith J. Schultz wrote:
>>>
>>>         If Yes, then the question would be how easy would it be to modify Xe(La)TeX
>>>         to be localizable.
>> [snip, snip
>
>> ]
>> But of course you can always do simply
>>     \let\greekcommand=\englishcommand
> 	This would be a good idea, but the original thought was also
> 	for using localized units and such.
>
>> for all the commands you might be aware of ... but you still end up
>> with packages that need to be called with their original name written
>> in latin, and if you want to load any package, you need to translate
>> all of their commands as well. In which case you end up with a
>> TeX4HT-sized project.
> 	I have not dugged into the parser of xetex, so I can not actually say
> 	how hard it would be to inject a localizable layer.
> 	There would have to commands switching the "dialects".
> 	The idea is to have the localization on a low level, so that
> 	the packages do not necessarily need to be localized and the localization
> 	can be loaded separately. We do not want to reinvent the wheel, just make
> 	it better.
>
> 	I am brainstorming here and personally do not have the time to do the work.
>
> 	regards
> 		Keith.
> 	
>
>
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