Hi Aleksandar,
Thank you very much for your interesting comments. I think your idea of
applying org-babel to (multi) language support is tremendously
suggestive and, of course, more org-centric. I suppose it could be
applied also to languages within the paragraph by inline blocks... I
really liked what you propose.
Well, I admit that my marks are a bit exotic :-D. The main problem I see
is that they are not as robust as Org's own marks, since they are
controlled by an export filter. Doing some further tests, by the way, I
think it would be better to add the filter to
`org-export-filter-plain-text-functions', instead of
`...final-output-functions'. I also see that it would be convenient to
avoid their expansion in verbatim texts, with a `(unless
(org-in-verbatim-emphasis)...)'.
Anyway, I think (in general terms) it would be interesting for Org to
incorporate some multilingual support and the ability to toggle between
languages in a document, and the idea you propose seems to
me that it makes a lot of sense.
Best regards,
Juan Manuel
Aleksandar Dimitrov writes:
> Hi Juan,
>
> this sounds very interesting to me, as I, too, mostly write in Org
> and, sometimes write documents in multiple languages, usually with
> different varieties of either Latin or Cyrillic.
>
> I have some suggestions:
>
> Apart from the export, one of my biggest gripes is
> flyspell. Specifically, the fact that you have to choose one language to
> spell check the entire document with. That is insufficient in my case.
>
> I think that the syntax you're suggesting looks good, but I'm not
> sure how well it'd fit into org-mode's ecosystem. I had something in
> mind that was closer to how org-babel works (it's called *babel*
> for a reason, isn't it? :D)
>
> #+begin_src org :lang pl
> … po polsku
> #+end_src
>
> #+begin_src org :lang de
> … auf deutsch
> #+end_src
>
>
> This would make use of org-mode's edit special environment function. It
> would make it easier to persuade flyspell to do the right thing. You
> could, perhaps, add
>
> #+LANGUAGE: en
>
> to the parent document, and then org would take care to set the correct
> flyspell language (and the correct macros on LaTeX-export) and change
> these parameters in the special environments.
>
> I'm not 100% sure it should be #+begin_src org, maybe introducing a
> different special environment would be better, say #+begin_lang XX where
> XX is the ISO-code of said language, or the locale (think en_US
> vs. en_GB.)
>
> The drawback, and the clear disadvantage compared to your method is that
> this works great only when the languages are separated by paragraph
> breaks.
>
> Therefore, I think our suggestions might be somewhat orthogonal. Yours
> could be a shorthand syntax for introducing inline foreign-language
> snippets.
>
> What do you think?
>
> Regards,
> Aleks
>
> Juan Manuel Macías writes:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I'm curious to see how other Org users deal with multilingual documents,
>> that is, those documents (for example, philology or linguistics texts)
>> that contain a significant number of online quotes in other languages.
>> Naturally, this makes more sense in the LaTeX backend, since it is
>> convenient to enclose these quotes in a \foreignlanguage command to
>> ensure that LaTeX at least apply the correct hyphenation patterns for
>> words in other languages.
>>
>> Luckily, in the latest versions of Babel (the Babel of LaTeX) you don't
>> need to do this when it comes to languages whose script is different
>> from Latin (e.g. Greek, languages with Cyrillic, Arabic, Hindi, etc.).
>> We can, for example, define Russian and Greek as:
>>
>> #+begin_src latex
>> \babelprovide[onchar=ids fonts,hyphenrules=russian]{russian}
>> \babelprovide[onchar=ids fonts,hyphenrules=ancientgreek]{greek}
>> #+end_src
>>
>> And also the fonts for both languages:
>>
>> #+begin_src latex
>> \babelfont[russian]{rm}{Linux Libertine O}
>> \babelfont[greek]{rm}]{Free Serif}
>> #+end_src
>>
>> For Latin-based scripts it is still necessary enclose the text in the
>> \foreignlanguage command. And now comes the question: how do Org users
>> who work in multilingual documents to obtain this command when exporting
>> to Latex?
>>
>> I usually use macros, which always tend to work fine. But lately I have
>> been testing an alternative markup system using an export filter. The
>> idea would be something like:
>>
>> %(lang) lorem ipsum dolor %()
>>
>> I start from a list of the most used languages:
>>
>> #+begin_src emacs-lisp
>> (langs '(("en" "english")
>> ("fr" "french")
>> ("de" "german")
>> ("it" "italian")
>> ("pt" "portuguese")))
>> #+end_src
>>
>> And other possible languages that Babel supports can be indicated
>> explicitly, by prepending "--":
>>
>> %(fr) ... %()
>>
>> %(--esperanto) ... %()
>>
>> (If someone wants to try it, I attach a small Org document).
>>
>> Best regards,
>>
>> Juan Manuel
>
>
--
--
