Subject: Re: localization formats proposal
From: Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu Jul 19 2001 - 22:17:25 CDT
--- Dom Lachowicz <dominicl@seas.upenn.edu> wrote: >
Quoting Andrew Dunbar <hippietrail@yahoo.com>:
>
> > I understand. My point is still that this may not
> be
> > what they *want to do* because of a lack of
> choice.
> > If a bilingual person from a mainland European
> country
> > wishes to create a document intended for Britain,
> > Ireland, Australia, etc; they are not ignorant and
> > know that we don't use or appreciate American
> english.
> > We don't want to force these (and many others)
> into
> > blindly using en-US.
>
> I've been following this thread, and I must say that
> I'm confused by it.
>
> How would (could?) we blindly force users into
> authoring under the en-US locale
> (though I argue that there should be no en other
> than en-US :)
No we don't do this but I feel the need to rant
against
it once in a while in case somebody might think it's
a good idea. The problem is if we use any of the
other en languages, we have no spellchecking at all.
> We have profile files set up that try to auto-set
> the Document locale smartly.
> We have different dictionaries that are easily
> downloadable so that spell-check
> works with an acceptably close dictionary. We have a
> nice little language dialog
> that lets you set the locale for any arbitrary
> amount of text. So I guess that
> I'm wondering what the perceived problem is and how
> we might fix it.
What it boils down to is that we ship with the
American hash but not the British hash. I strongly
feel the British hash has much more widespread use in
all but one English speaking country as a reasonable
stand-in for our own English dialects - which seem not
to have ispell/pspell dictionaries available.
A good fix would be something roughly like this:
* Ship with both American and British dicitonaries.
(Or have a package including British instead)
* Implement a "Just Works" mechanism that allows
en-** users to spellcheck documents with a "close
enough" dictionary instead of having no
spellchecking
(as it is now), or marking the document as some
other language/dialect just to get spellchecking.
* Figure out how this really should relate to our
locale system, options dialog, etc.
* Deep thought about same for different flavours of
French, German, the dialetc problem in general.
Does that make it clearer?
Andrew Dunbar.
=====
http://linguaphile.sourceforge.net
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