aboutsummaryrefslogtreecommitdiffstats
path: root/doc/user/bas_lang
diff options
context:
space:
mode:
Diffstat (limited to 'doc/user/bas_lang')
-rw-r--r--doc/user/bas_lang85
1 files changed, 85 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/doc/user/bas_lang b/doc/user/bas_lang
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3b32a94
--- /dev/null
+++ b/doc/user/bas_lang
@@ -0,0 +1,85 @@
+@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
+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