Subject: Re: multi-lingual support under Unix
From: Karl Ove Hufthammer (huftis@bigfoot.com)
Date: Sat Dec 30 2000 - 09:26:33 CST
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike Nordell" <tamlin@algonet.se>
To: "AbiWord-dev" <abiword-dev@abisource.com>
Sent: Saturday, December 30, 2000 3:45 PM
Subject: Re: multi-lingual support under Unix
> Another thing that I came to think of, and I'm not sure it's im place
> already:
> We should be able to change *sections* of a document to different languages.
> This is *needed* information for at least the spell-checker. Our beloved
> comparable app Word does indeed allow you to set different languages for
> pieces of a document.
>
> As for implementation, I think it should only be allowed at the paragraph
> level.
I strongly disagree. It should be allowed everywhere. A couple of reasons of the
top of my head:
* Language-based hyphenation
* Exporting (e.g. to LaTeX (which uses language-based hyphenation) and XHTML
(where it's useful for speech browsers)
* Spell-checking
* Smart-quotes
But we also need a *document* language (taken from the current locale (when
creating a new document)). This is the language "for the whole document". You
can have sections, paragraphs, quotes &c. in different language, but only *one*
document language. Things this could be used for:
* Sorting (different language use different sorting rules, but the sorting rules
are document-wide)
* Default typographically correct features (e.g. in Norwegian documents, the
default list marker should be an en-dash, not a bullet)
* Default date&time field/language of date&time field
* Smart-quotes (not sure if this should be document-wide or change when you
change language of a section -- perhaps it's language-dependant!)
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