[sword-devel] .conf lang tags

[sword-devel@crosswire.org]

> 	If your frontend really wants to support swapping fonts based on the 
> content, you can derive the context based on the character ranges used. 
>   For example, if you examine the characters used in a key for an entry 
> and decide they are all in the Thai unicode pages, then you know you 
> need a font that has the Thai pages populated.  I'm not quite sure 
> adding support at a lower level of granularity than "all the code pages 
> used in this module" is ideal.  It would mean adding much additional 
> markup that can be derived just the same by looking at the character 
> itself.  Does this make sense?
> 
> 		-Troy.

Consider a text with English and German words. German has some letters which 
English does not have and so may need a special font (someone may desire to 
not use this German font for English, because he may have a better quality 
English (ACSII) font). But computer cannot distinguish English and German 
words!

So, without explicit language tags we have alternatives:

- use worse German font for everything;

- mix in one word two different fonts;

- sometimes render German words by one and somtimes by an another font.

So we need explicit language tags! This is the way W3C has choosen for HTML!

BTW, XML standard specifies xml:lang attributes for this!
-- 
Victor Porton (porton@ex-code.com)


-- 
Victor Porton (porton@ex-code.com)