On Thu, 24 Sep 1998, David L. Johnson wrote:
> ---Reply to mail from Philippe Depouilly about Problem with forign languages
> > Is there any possibility to translate the key words as choosing a
> > language.
> I don't know of a better way. Even in amsmath, such environments are
> actually extensions of a basic "theorem" environment. The preamble
> contains bits of TeX code that define the various flavors, which gives the
> various mathematical environments. Unfortunately, the displayed (and
> printed) nomenclatures are hardcoded, and I don't know how to circumvent
> that (I would appreciate ideas on that!). The Chapter, etc., stuff is
> changed according to the language chosen, I guess? How can that be made
> to work in this case?
Philippe is onto a problem in LyX that goes deep down into the code.
(and I believe I've been raving on about this before =)
One semiproblem is whether to allow multilingual documents or not, and if
so in what way we should deal with it. Another is what to do about the swap
from from one style to another within a document. For the moment there is
the possibilty of defining separate styles (on document level and on
paragraph level) for a certain language, but there's no mechanism to
`translate' one paragraph to another (according to `language' in the
regular sense or to a change in layout for the whole document, i.e. from
`article' to `book' -- the code doesn't know about natural languages, it's
only concerned about sets of paragraph styles).
On what level should `language' be set? Should it be set for the whole
document, at paragraph level, or at character level? If it's set on the
two latter, how should we provide a mechanism to translate the setting for
one language into another (or should we even bother to?). As J-M pointed
out before (months ago -- last time we talked about it), this concerns a
number of things; the spell-checker, quotations, language support package
in LaTeX/TeX, whatever...
An article consists of sections, a book consists of chapters. (Not to
mention all the other styles that are supported) If an article is changed
into a book, sections in the article would become chapters in the book,
subsections in the article would become sections in the book, and so on
(and vice-versa!). As things are now, the (paragraph) style name is set in
the style-files so allthough it's possible to define a style-file for one
language it's not translatable to another language, not even to a different
style. I think it's possible to design a mechanism that solves this in a
neat way (and fast enough -- it won't be needed often, but when it is, it
will save a lot of work for the user), we only need to figure out how it
should work.
NB! Don't mix up the language of the user interface with the language of
the text, these are separate things. I'm only concerned about the language
of the text here, not the user interface (which allways should be set with
the LANG variable or similar)
(And of course I'm not talking about the 0.12-series which I feel is good
enough to ship now -- perhaps we need yet another update of the po-files
though, but these are somewhat separate from the programme itself, aren't
they?)
Joacim
-
With both feet on the ground, you won't get very far.
-- Loesje
