Hi Alexandros,
Though I sympathize with your goal and always thought that LaTex&Co
would be better off if it had its commands in different languages.
But, Xe(La)TeX is a macro language and as such "predefined".
Though you can rename the command names it would make it harder
to exchange information and get help from non greeks or whatever
language one would set-up such a system. Furthermore, you make it harder
for those who are beginners to Xe(La)TeX to learn the TeX way of doing
things.
That is if they take documentation off the web or other books they will
end up
using a mix of your "GreekXe(La)Tex" and the officially defined
commands.
One possibility though would be to develop a preprocessor that
translated the greek
commands to Xe(La)Tex (aka English). This way if some did have a
problem they could
just run the preprocessor over the input and recieve an "official"
Xe(La)TeX source that
can be shared. Such a preprocessor could be written in perl or even in
Tex proper.
You would need only to identify the commands (usually preceded by a
"\"), parse for
paramaters, look in a translation table for greek and exchange them
with the english
counterpart. If the command or parameter is not found in the table just
do nothing.
This is somewhat simplified, but i believe a better approach.
regards
Keith.
Am 12.10.2010 um 08:21 schrieb Alexandros Gotsis:
> Dear friends,
>
> I am trying to "greekify" XeLaTex in order to make it easier for greek
> writers to use. I have translated almost all the commands (e.g., instead of
> \begin{document} I can use \αρχή{κειμένου}, etc.) that I could think of and
> made new article, book etc. classes with the greek commands. These new
> classes just renew the commands etc. and they work rather well. There are a
> few errors still that I try to figure out, but there are also a couple of
> things that I do not know how to do and, therefore, ask your advise/help.
>
> 1. I could replace almost all commands of (Xe)LaTeX, but I can do nothing
> with the very first one: \documentclass{}! Is there a way to change the name
> of this command so that the XeLaTeX engine still understands it? I am looking
> for solutions that will not include any extra (latin) text in the source
> file, as this would defy the purpose.
>
> 2. While I have changed the names for "Chapter", "Figure", the dates, the
> numbers, capitalisation etc. (thanks for all this go to the work of
> Syropoylos in Xanthi), I do not know how to change things as, e.g., [c]
> (center) to [κ] (κέντρο), the length units (from mm το χ etc.). For the time
> being I would not change anything in the math environments.
>
> 3. I do not know how to change the alphabetical order in "makeindex". Usually
> the accented vowels follow the corresponding unaccented ones in a greek
> index,. This is not the case for "makeindex", as it follows the unicode
> listing. which is defined differently, and the result looks wrong in a greek
> index list (ευρετήριο).
>
> The idea behind the changes is that a writer of greek text (or arab, chinese
> etc.) should not be obliged to change his/her computer keyboard to latin for
> the commands and back again for the text. Also the names of the commands
> would be more transparent for non-english speakers.
>
> Every help on this would be appreciated. I can send you the tentative cls,
> sty, etc. files that I have generated, if you are interested to try (but I am
> afraid they will be all greek to you, literally).
>
> Thanks
>
> Alexandros D. Gotsjs
> Assoc.Prof., Technical University of Crete
> tel +30-2821037259
> http://users.isc.tuc.gr/~gotsis/
>
>
>
>
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