2009/5/13 Jürgen Spitzmüller <[email protected]>: > James C. Sutherland wrote: > >> However, I really don't want to have any notion of >> the "language" my documents are written in. > > This will have the consequence that your text, even if monolingually > English, > > * will not be hyphenated correctly > * cannot be spellchecked
Well, babel at least isn't required for spell checking. However, in a broad picture there are two ways babel can be used: 1) "Old way" User manually adds \foriegnlanguage tags to quoted text, loan words, etc. 2) "New way" LyX stores language text is in, and outputs tags to switch between lanuages. With the (1), if the user puts \foriegnlanguage tags around all quote etc., producing a UK edition from a US addition is trivial: Switch the document type to UK, spellcheck (hopefully the author has avoided ambiguous dates etc.), and 5 minutes later we have a version of the document in UK English. With (2) it is not so simple. The obvious way is to switch the document type to UK English, but then LyX fights your decision by adding \foriegnlanguage tags around everything. You can fix this by selecting All and reseting the language. Then however, all the quotes are now in UK English as well, even e.g. French quotes. AFAICT, LyX has no way of distinguishing between (a) "This is text is in UK English because this is a UK English document" and (b) "This text is in UK English, because it is a quote, name etc.". This distinction seems to be useful when preparing the same document in different dialects. We could add an additional language "Default" to allow us to distinguish between (a) and (b), if we felt this was important. -- John C. McCabe-Dansted PhD Student University of Western Australia
