----- Original Message -----
From: "WJCarpenter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "AbiWord Mailing List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Monday, November 06, 2000 7:33 PM
Subject: Re: Pspell Support
> dom> This got me thinking: can we have an option in AbiWord to switch
> dom> locales/languages, kind of like how MSWord does? It seems like
> dom> it'd be easy to do with the new encoding manager. I'll look into
> dom> this...
>
> While you're thinking (and possibly acting) on this, I suggest that
> LOCALE be an attribute of text in an Abi document, not much different
> from fonts, sizes, and other treatments. I'd imagine a default LOCALE
> for a document, and then menu items for switching LOCALE, changing the
> LOCALE of a highlighted region, etc. (This is an idea that was
> discussed briefly a few months back with respect to smart quotes with
> different rules for different LOCALEs. Same idea for spelling.)
I have one comment. We'll need a *document* language and text regions languages.
The document language is the language "the whole document" is written in, while
the region language is the language of regions of text. A document language is
important for several reasons, mainly sorting, typographically correct features
(e.g. in Norwegian documents, the default list marker should be an en-dash, not
a bullet) and exporting. The default document language (and region language, of
course) for new documents should be the language of the user's locale (for the
'nn-NO' locale, it should be 'nn' and for the 'en-US' locale, it should be
'en-US').
I think using the xml:lang attribute would be a good idea for specifying the
language of elements. For the document language, I guess we should use a
'language' or 'doclang' attribute on the top-level element 'abiword'.
--#
Karl Ove Hufthammer
