[XeTeX] [tex-live] XeTeX/TeX Live : Setting the default language

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Fri, Nov 4, 2011 at 13:17, Philip TAYLOR (Webmaster, Ret'd)
<P.Taylor at rhul.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with TeX, and the Word was
> TeX." ?!

It might be that TeX was before Word ;) ...

> TeX is, traditionally, consistent across
> installations; what I am suggesting is that there is
> a case for making it consistent with the way that other
> applications operate within a single location, by (optionally)
> honouring the user's regional settings / locale ...

... but even Word stores language information into the document (based
on whatever heuristics - language of installation, keyboard being used
...). If you try to print a document created on British computer in
USA, you will still get British settings, while this is not the case
in what you are trying to achieve.

You might be using British English only, but in general your approach
would not even work for one-user environment. I'm producing
approximately 50% of written material in English and the other half in
my mother tongue. If TeX would ask me for default language and
encoding, I would happily choose Slovenian (and ISO Latin 2 or CP1250
before Unicode existed) and happily break approximately half of my own
documents, and each single document created by others.

The only "sane" way to achieve what you are proposing would be *TeX
Editor* automatically inserting language to you document header based
on current language environment or keyboard that is being used.

Mojca