On 2010-03-01, Jürgen Spitzmüller wrote: > Guenter Milde wrote: >> While this is the "reine Lehre", it is often impractical.
>> * Quite a lot of acronyms are international and will not be hyphenated >> anyway. > Not true. Why, it is not a contradiction to "quite a lot of ... " if some.. > Acronyms are language-dependent (cf. IPA vs. API). > The fact that many acronyms derive from English does not change that. But this is "unfair": in a German document, you kan keep the language as German and write RADAR or Laser, in a Greek document, you need to switch langugae (or insert \latintext as ERT) to write "Corine". >> * SI unit symbols are international as well. > For SI units, we need markup anyway (in order to use a proper package > such as siunitx). But (hopefully) only optional! I prefer to keep control myself. >> * Short quotes in a language that I do not have installed. It would be >> misleading to mark e.g. a Vietnamese quote as French in a Greek >> document, just to prevent it to become Greeeknamese. > If you quote Vietnamese, you have to use the Vietnamese language > environment. Period. Again, this is very inconvenient. Do you really expect me to become root, install texlive-language-vietnamese (actually first find out the correct name) reconfigure TeX and LyX just to write one Vietnamese word??? >> Also, the current behaviour is unusal in two ways: >> a) In LyX, I can easily insert Greek or Cyrillic symbols/words in a text >> written with the Latin or Cyrillic alphabet, this is currently not >> possible for Latin inside Greek. > That's why we need KeyboardLocaleEncoding support. I agree that the coupling of keyboard locale and text language can be an advancement. It will, however, not help with copy/paste. > Also, I find inserting Greek characters by means of the Symbols dialog > or by means of copy/paste all but "easy". Copy/paste of Greek Unicode is for me not more difficult than copy/paste of English. Inserting via the Symbols dialoge is only an option for the single letter when I don't remember a faster input method (in math, I'd write \alpha ... \omega or use M-G a-o). >> b) In other Unicode aware programs (as well as with LyX/XeTeX), Latin >> characters stay Latin even in a Greek context. > True. >> Practicability beats purity! > Practicability depends on the user. A user with only a Latin keyboard will > find the tranliteration more practical. So do I. > A user who uses different keyboard layouts/encodings will find direct > input more practical. That's why we need both: a) > transliteration as default It could become a non-default option for new documents. b) The "normal" behaviour (no transliteration if not requested) as option. c) > language/encoding switch if the users set up their OS to use > keyboard layouts/localizations. This could indeed become the best option for Greek users (and others with multiple keyboard layouts). However, as there is no 1:1 mapping of keyboard layouts and document languages, this power feature needs careful planning to be comprehensible, easy to configure and does not stand in the way. Also, it will not help with existing documents (created in another editor, or taken from the net). This is why we still need b) (unless we force the needy to use XeTeX). > I bet people who regularly write Greek and English (have to) do the > latter anyway. However, there is more than one way to do this setup... > BTW you also need to take backwards compatibility into account. You cannot > change the behaviour just like that (without breaking old documents). I do not want to change the rendering of old documents (however, compiling with XeTeX instead of LaTeX or pdflatex will do so). Günter
