@Section
@Title { Languages other than English }
@Tag { languages }
@Begin
@PP
When part of a document is written in a language other than English,
languages. @Index { languages other than English }
Lout should be informed of this using the @Code "@Language" symbol:
language. @Index @Code "@Language"
@ID @OneRow @Code {
"... the garter, he said: French @Language { `Honi soit qui mal y"
"pense' }, and this saying ..."
}
Changing language is quite analogous to changing font using the
@Code "@Font" symbol.
@PP
Since accented characters (Section {@NumberOf characters}) are always
available irrespective of the language, at first sight it might seem
that there is no need to bother informing Lout what language you are
writing in. However, words are hyphenated differently depending on the
hyphenation.languages @SubIndex { in languages other than English }
language, and some symbols have different results in different
languages. For example,
@ID @Code "Danish @Language @Date"
produces
@ID { Danish @Language @Date }
date.languages @SubIndex { in languages other than English }
time.languages @SubIndex { in languages other than English }
lists.languages @SubIndex { in languages other than English }
and the alphabetic list symbols of Section {@NumberOf lists} also
vary with the current language. So it's worth doing for the sake of
knowing that non-English parts will appear as they should.
@PP
At the time of writing, the following languages were available:
@ID @OneRow @Code {
Czech Cesky Cestina
Danish Dansk
Dutch Nederlands
English
EnglishUK
Finnish Suomi
French Francais Fran{@Char ccedilla}ais
German Deutsch
Hungarian Magyar
Italian Italiano
Norwegian Norsk
Polish Polski
Portuguese Português
Russian
Slovenian Slovenia Slovenija
Spanish Espa{@Char ntilde}ol
Swedish Svenska
}
As shown, most languages have alternative names, all equally acceptable
to the @Code "@Language" symbol. @Code "EnglishUK" differs from
@Code "English" only by applying hyphenation rules said to be more
appropriate for British English. Hungarian does not yet allow
hyphenation.
@PP
If your entire document is in a language other than English, you need
to change the @Code "@InitialLanguage" option:
initiallanguage. @Index @Code "@InitialLanguage"
@ID @Code "@InitialLanguage { Deutsch }"
If you are using your own setup file (Section {@NumberOf setup}), you
can change it there. If not, you can change it at the start of your
document, as explained in Section {@NumberOf ordinary}.
@PP
Czech, Polish, and Slovenian use the ISO-LATIN-2 character set, and
users of these languages have to place
@ID @Code "@SysInclude { latin2 }"
at the very start of their documents in order to get access to the
ISO-LATIN-2 versions of the fonts. These have family names such as
TimesCE, CourierCE, HelveticaCE, and so on, to distinguish them
from the same fonts encoded in ISO-LATIN-1. The face names are
unchanged. Consult file @Code "latin2.fd" in the standard include
directory for a complete list of these fonts.
@PP
Russian uses Cyrillic characters. In principle, users of Russian
have to place
@ID @Code "@SysInclude { russian }"
at the very start of their documents in order to get access to
Cyrillic fonts. However no such fonts are distributed
with the current version of Lout, so this line does nothing at
present. Other left-to-right languages are easily added, so
consult the author if your language is not listed.
@End @Section
