On Dec 5, 2007, at 2:40 AM, Mojca Miklavec wrote:

I have noticed that ConTeXt uses "gr" for Greek, but the ISO code seems to be "el". Less problematic: should agr be grc instead? (OpenType uses PGR, but I'm not sure if that's the same thing.)

What do the Greek experts say?

Hi Mojca, I have no strong opinion regarding gr/el, but what would "grc" stand for? Thomas

2007/12/5, Mojca Miklavec :

Hello,

I have noticed that ConTeXt uses "gr" for Greek, but the ISO code seems to be "el". Less problematic: should agr be grc instead? (OpenType uses PGR, but I'm not sure if that's the same thing.)

What do the Greek experts say?

Well, English is a story on its own. "us" and "uk" don't have their own codes as a separate language, and even worse: uk should stand for Ukrainian!!!

"Norwegian" (which is not a language at all) should be patched (according to an old user request) once.

A similar problem exists with: - Chinese (cn instead of zn) - Czech (cz instead of cs) - Vietnamese (vn instead of vi) - Ukrainian (ua instead of uk!!!)

A case where I have no opinion: - deo

Some languages have already changed their codes in the past: - Spanish: sp -> es - German: du -> de - Slovenian: si -> sl (no trace left, I hope :)

My proposal would be to change: - gr -> el - agr -> grc - cz -> cs - vn -> vi - deo -> ? (if at all) gmh - German, Middle High (ca.1050-1500) goh - German, Old High (ca.750-1050) - cn -> zn (with *lots of care*)

And to keep all the needed synonyms. (Besides that: to issue a warning if possible.)

I have no idea what to do with Ukrainian and UK though.

-------------

Another issue: some languages need some little modifications or alternatives:

1.) In German, Slovenian, Croatian, (maybe in other languages as well) ... one can use two types of quotes: - „" U+201E/U+201C & ‚' U+201A/U+2018 (sorry, a bug in gmail reencodes them) - »« U+00BB/U+00AB & ›‹ U+203A/U+2039

It is also common two write «text ‹text› text» in German.

It might make sense to be able to say something similar to \mainlanguage [german] [quotes | quotationmarks | quotationstyle = guillemots | guillemets or comma | ninesix]

2.) I could imagine a Serbian user to request being able to typeset in two scritpts (Latin or Cyrillic). That means: - different labels - loading different hyphenation patterns (even though transcription in either direction can be made on the fly - I can confirm that a user has already asked me if I know how to input text in cyrillic and get output in latin - as he wasn't fluent in reading Cyrillic, he wanted to misuse ConTeXt to help him read texts from web)

So I could imagine making Cyrillic the default script, but still letting one to use

\mainlanguage [serbian] [script=latin, % or even (if any user would be enthusiastic enough to provide code) transliteration=on]

and get latin labels and hyphenation patterns.

3.) Solve the problem with English in a more elegant way:

\mainlanguage [english] [alternative=us]

or

\mainlanguage[en][US] % as in "en_US.UTF-8" \mainlanguage[en][GB] \mainlanguage[en][AU] \mainlanguage[de][AT] % if one ever figures out that "German from Germany" isn't good enough

Then, [us] should be kept as a synonym for \mainlanguage[en][US].

(The examples above could also be called via \mainlanguage[de][alternative=guillemets] or

As mentioned above this won't work.

\mainlanguage[sr][alternative=latin].)

4.) deo \mainlanguage[de][alternative=old] ??? (no idea what that is about)

The old rules should't be used any longer :-)

Note that 1.) could be combined (should be "combinable") with this one.

Any thoughts?

I think we should keep the current syntax with mkii and allow better control in the mkiv code. Wolfgang

Mojca Miklavec wrote:

Hello,

I have noticed that ConTeXt uses "gr" for Greek, but the ISO code seems to be "el". Less problematic: should agr be grc instead? (OpenType uses PGR, but I'm not sure if that's the same thing.)

What do the Greek experts say?

etc etc note: this language inventory is part of introducing dynamic feature support in mkiv, which boils down to automatic adaption to languages and such; for this we need relationships between scripts, languages, otf tags etc Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------