[XeTeX] babel

[Mojca Miklavec]

On 23 March 2016 at 19:31, Javier Bezos <listas at tex-tipografia.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm working on a new version of babel, with a new way to define
> languages in a descriptive way, more than in a programmatic one (of
> course, the latter won't be excluded because it's still necessary).
>
> The idea is to create a set of ini file like those you can find on
>
> https://latex-project.org/svnroot/latex2e-public/trunk/required/babel/locales/
>
> They are tentative and some of them are incomplete. I'm working on the
> code to read and 'transform' their data, but in the meanwhile I'd like
> to improve the ini files. The first step in the roadmap is to provide
> real utf-8 strings for captions and dates with current styles so
> that they can be useable even without fontenc.
>
> Any help or comments would be greatly appreciated.

The alphabetic order here is completely confusing:

days.format.wide.fri =
days.format.wide.mon =
days.format.wide.sat =
days.format.wide.sun =
days.format.wide.thu =
days.format.wide.tue =
days.format.wide.wed =

What is the difference between captions and captions.licr?

What is the difference between months.format.wide and
months.stand-alone.wide? In Slovenian one sometimes uses the genetive
form of the date, like
    Today is "24. marec 2016" (nominativ)
    This happened on "24. marca 2016" (genetiv)
I don't know whether there is any sane way to encode this though.

I don't know how months.format.narrow is used, but a single letter is
completely useless because it's too ambiguous. One uses 24.3.2016 or
24.03.2016 (in tables etc. where aligning is important). Whether or
not there is space in date.short is debatable. (Officially it's
correct to use space, but almost nobody uses it.) Officially one is
also supposed to write time with a dot rather than colon, but most use
a colon.

German typography doesn't use French spacing as far as I know.

For Slovenian:
- OT1 and LY1 are not suitable encondings.
- Glossary is not a slovenian word. It should probably be "Slovar"
- headto = Prejme is weird
- righthyphenmin = 2
- I don't understand the zillion entries about hyphenchar, but it must
be similar to other European languages.
- Having just "quotes =" might not be sufficient if you want to
automatically support quotes one day like ConTeXt does with
\quote{...} and \quotation{...}. We use two flavours (one can decide
to use either one or the other) and in both flavours one has both
single and double quotes.
  (a) ›single‹ »double«
  (b) ‚single‘ „double“
- What is meant with "exponential = e"? (I use $2{,}1\cdot 10^{-5}$ or
perhaps \times instead of \cdot.) Isn't "e" just a convention for
entering numbers into computers that has absolutely nothing to do with
typography?

I'm not sure if it's correct to use "po n. št." or just "n. št." (at
some point you will probably have to introduce comments in those ini
files). But we don't have BCE. So you might want to use something like
this (I don't want to certify correctness):

eras.abbreviated.0-alt-variant = pr. Kr.
eras.abbreviated.0 = pr. n. št.
eras.abbreviated.1 = po n. št.
eras.abbreviated.1-alt-variant = po Kr.
eras.wide.0-alt-variant = pred Kristusom
eras.wide.0 = pred našim štetjem
eras.wide.1 = našega štetja % or "po našem štetju"
eras.wide.1-alt-variant = po Kristusu
eras.narrow.0-alt-variant = pr. Kr.
eras.narrow.0 = pr. n. št.
eras.narrow.1 = po n. št.
eras.narrow.1-alt-variant = po Kr.

The following is useless (= nobody will understand):

dayPeriods.format.narrow.am = d
dayPeriods.format.narrow.noon = n
dayPeriods.format.narrow.pm = p

We use numbers 0-23 to denote hour of the day rather than some bogus "d/n/p".

Mojca