Well, this has become a fairly long thread. I'll just note that I
don't have strong feelings about this specific proposal.
E.g. if the language tags were obvious and self-explanatory in the
text, like the insets that can be removed just by pressing backspace,
this would overcome some of my dislike for the automatic addition of
language tags.
On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 3:23 PM, Jürgen Spitzmüller <sp...@lyx.org> wrote:
> John McCabe-Dansted wrote:
>> I also consider it strange that the language can change within a word.
>
> Define "word" (for languages such as, say, English, German and Japanese).
In English anything separated by a space, punctuation etc. Finding
word breaks in Japanese is a bit harder.
It probably isn't actually worth doing anything about this oddness.
>> In my case \selectlanguage{american} etc. has popped up up a number of
>> times, and in all cases the LaTeX I want is exactly the LaTeX that
>> results when I remove \selectlanguage{[^}]*}.
>>
>> > However, if I copy a French sentence into an English document, I see no
>> > reason whatsoever to make the sentence English. French is French and not
>> > English, after all. Resetting the language would be a bug, IMHO.
>>
>> In my case my documents are pure English, but I might:
>> 1) Copy an acronym (or character) from a French document (unlikely)
>
> Usually, Acronyms are language-specific as well (cf. IPA [International
> Phonetic Association] vs. API [Association Phonétique Internationale]).
This still wouldn't help me, because I don't have any French language
documents. I'd be pasting from a French language website, if I was
very lucky I might be pasting from an English language document where
I had explicitly set that text to French; in which case copying over
the tags might make sense.
Point being that for a substantial class of users, the LaTeX model
where copying text only copies tags in that text is more useful for
language except in a few very rare cases. As argued elsewhere it may
also be useful for copying e.g. a word from a section title as well.
>> 2) Copy text from English US to English UK -- IMHO An English UK word
>> in an English US document is actually just a poorly spelt US English
>> word. Actually it is likely to even be a correctly spelt English US
>> word.
>
> Why? IMHO it is correct to keep it marked es English (UK), The author hgas to
> decide if he leaves it in UK spelling or if he adapts the spelling to US
> convention (and reset the language).
The spellchecker will pickup the misspellings, unless LyX keeps it
marked as English (UK).
Admittedly, Leaving it as UK might be useful if it was a direct quote,
and had proper quotation marks around it. (And yes I realize that
detecting quotations in every possible language could be difficult,
even for languages that actually have quotation marks. However I use
citations rather than quotes, so again this isn't something that makes
a difference)
>> In principle I may be submitting a document to an organization that
>> requires that all text be in Language X (and only language X), in
>> which case any LyX document I submit that contains language markup is
>> wrong, just as if I had included a Chapter in an article.
>
> But not if you use different languages (if this organization is not completely
> crazy, that is).
If I use a Chapter is a journal article, then it clearly should be
formatted as a Chapter, rather than e.g. standard?
If I did accidentally insert a Chapter into a article, it would at
least be a lot easier to find in proof-reading than multiple
"languages"
in a document that is actually monolingual. (Being able to add
Chapters into e.g. amsart it could actually be useful, often I've
wanted to do "something like style X, but with a feature from Y")
Even when using a foreign word it is common to convert it to a local
word. Japanese would commonly write English words in Katakana, and I
don't use Mitsubishi as a Japanese word, and I certainly don't write
it as 三菱 in an English document.
>> More likely, the receiving institution really wouldn't care whether I
>> use British or American English, so long as I am consistent. So in
>> this case hard-coding either British or American English would be
>> fine, but allowing both is again in some sense incorrect.
>
> But then, again, hyphenation might be just wrong.
Well I am not advocating hardcoding, never-the-less it would
presumably correct according to one of the two acceptable definitions
of correct. (at least if you spell words according to the hard-coded
language).
>> I note that LyX automatically removes \Chapter when pasting to an
>> article. IMHO it also makes perfect sense to also remove
>> "\selectlanguage{british}" "\selectlanguage{american}" etc. when
>> pasting to a monolingual document. Perhaps all documents could start
>> in a "defacto monolingual" state, and when the first \selectlanguage
>> would be inserted the user could be asked whether they want a
>> "monolingual" document or "multilingual" document. If we were to get
>> fancy we could have documents where german/british are allowed but not
>> american.
>
> This is a very bad idea that will mixup any multilingual document. And, please
Clearly a setting a multilingual document to "monolingual" isn't going to help.
> excuse me, it strikes me rather monolingual-English centric, while LyX aims at
> being truly multilingual.
Presumably, not all monolingual users speak English; I would imagine
that French users may have similar issues with regard to French/French
Canadian.
In any case I don't see why this is an objection to this feature (I
can certainly see why you wouldn't want to work on it yourself).
I don't see any reason for LyX to not have features that only help
monolingual users, or rather users that only prepare monolingual
documents in LyX. I've studied other languages, and I could write a a
truly multilingual document, but then my readers would hate me. Heck,
I've had comments from reviewers that the "a" and the "e" in the
grapheme \ae{} look mushed together.
The main advantage that the lack this feature has for such users is
that the aggravation it causes them, might induce them to better
understand the difference between UK and US English. However if you
fix all the bugs wrt. ERT etc., and then most of them will probably
think the blue overline is just form of screen corruption (it doesn't
appear in the PDF after all). If nothing else, the
monomodal/mulitiligual dialog might clue them into what the blue line
actually means.
Also if this dialog popups up immediately when you attempt to paste
the text in, it would be obvious to you which source document had the
wrong (sub) language.
--
John C. McCabe-Dansted
PhD Student
University of Western Australia
