aboutsummaryrefslogtreecommitdiffstats
path: root/doc/user/bas_lang
blob: fec9a635207e75b8128bbdd97199d19085014782 (plain) (blame)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
@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 {
Croatian Hrvatski
Czech Cesky Cestina cs
Danish Dansk da
Dutch Nederlands nl
English en
EnglishUK en-GB
Finnish Suomi fi
French Francais Fran{@Char ccedilla}ais fr
German Deutsch de
Hungarian Magyar hu
Italian Italiano it
Norwegian Norsk no
Polish Polski pl
Portuguese Português pt
Russian ru
Slovak Slovensky Slovencina
Slovenian Slovenia Slovenija sl
Spanish Espa{@Char ntilde}ol es
Swedish Svenska sv
UpperSorbian hornjoserbsce serbsce
}
File @Code "include/langdefs" in the distribution always has the exact
list of known languages.  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.
@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 (at least) use the Latin2 character set,
and users of these languages have to place
@ID @Code "@SysInclude { latin2 }"
at the start of their documents in order to get access to the
Latin2 versions of the fonts.
@FootNote { Prior to Version 3.21 of Lout, some accented characters
were missing from these Latin2 fonts, but this deficiency has now
been corrected by getting Lout to generate output for these characters
which prints their base letter and accent separately. }  These have
family names such as TimesCE, CourierCE, HelveticaCE, and so on (CE
standing for Central European), to distinguish them from the same
fonts encoded in Latin1.  The face names are unchanged.  A typical
Latin2 document would therefore start off like this:
@ID @OneRow @Code {
"@SysInclude { latin2 }"
"@SysInclude { doc }"
"@Document"
"    @InitialLanguage { Polish }"
"    @InitialFont { TimesCE Base 12p }"
"//"
}
Depending on the document type there may be a few other font-setting
options in the setup file that need to be changed; in fact, it might be
best to produce your own setup file in this case, replacing {@Code "doc"},
with the changed options in it.  See Section {@NumberOf setup} for how
to do this.  You could even start your setup file off with
@Code "@SysInclude { latin2 }" to avoid the trouble of typing it at
the top of every document.  Consult database file @Code "latin2.ld"
in the standard database directory for a complete list of Latin2 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