DM Smith wrote: > On Jun 6, 2008, at 7:13 PM, Ben Morgan wrote: >> >> Just a question - do you think that the GUI controls, such as text >> boxes and lists and what not (everything but the actual text of the >> module), should be able to have a different font from the actual >> text? Currently under Windows at least, they would have a different >> font - arial I think is the default for the html, while it uses the >> default windows font for the GUI controls (probably verdana or >> something). > > As Peter and I worked on translating BibleDesktop into Farsi we > discovered many things about fonts and internationalization. The core > lesson is: > > Fonts should be able to be tied to a language for the text that is > being displayed. While it may be nice to have fonts set per module, it > is not necessary. When a text consists of multiple languages, each > piece should be clearly marked (as with xml's xml:lang attribute). > > (Actually, it really should be set at the level of "script" but I > don't know of any formalization of scripts that we could use. (Such as > ISO-639 for languages). I'm not sure that even if such a notion > existed whether we could make it understandable to users.)
ISO 15924 (or even BCP 47) as Jonathan suggests is the standard you're looking for. OSIS allows both xml:lang and script, with the understanding that the latter contain an ISO 15924 code. The definition of xml:lang has changed a little since we wrote OSIS, so script is basically unnecessary now. xml:lang holds a BCP 47 tag, which can contain language, script, & locale subtags. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCP_47 or just google BCP 46 or its two RFCs: 4646 and 4647. In assigning fonts throughout a text that isn't nicely tagged with script attributes, ICU can help you by identifying the script to which each character belongs (according to its ISO 15924 designation). I don't know whether Java itself provides anything similar. --Chris _______________________________________________ sword-devel mailing list: sword-devel@crosswire.org http://www.crosswire.org/mailman/listinfo/sword-devel Instructions to unsubscribe/change your settings at above page
