Hi Eike.
First thanks for reading and answering.
And sorry for still annoying you.
Many developers are adding new languages to OpenOffice.
Who does so?
In some Internet forums I read posts of people definitely trying this.
There were also messages from x...@l10n lists - but maybe these ones I
misinterpreted.
> This is important in case documents are saved in MS file formats.
I would forbid the MS file format filters to save automatically chosen
LangIDs and print some warning message trying to save a file containing
such IDs.
Saving in foreign formats (.doc/.rtf/...) there is always a little loss
of data.
> How should these people choose the proper MS-LangID?
If there is a MS-LangID assigned to the language (by Microsoft) it can
be found on some site in the Internet (I'm sure).
The list of languages could also be available on the OpenOffice.org website.
If there is no MS-LangID assigned there are four possibilities:
- You have to wait until Microsoft assigns the LangID so you will always
depend on Microsoft
(and maybe MS will ask for money to assign a LangID for minority
languages in the future!)
- You, some other OpenOffice authority assign(s) an ID
(But what happens if Microsoft assigns another language to that code
in the future??
And how about other programs that may also assign LangIDs that may
clash with the OpenOffice IDs??)
- The user assigns a LangID himself
(no comment)
- The language is assigned temporarily
to avoid problems the language codes must NOT be saved into files (so
when saving to MS file
formats the "exotic" language information is better removed than
writing bad language codes)
> Yet that would not allow to permanently store the ID in an MS file
format document, the assigned values
> would had to be stored in the configuration as well, ...
This is why I suggest to forbid the temporarily chosen LangID in MS
documents ("none" would be stored instead)
> ... because in ODF only valid ISO codes are allowed...
I would also not allow saving such a language ID to ODF. So - as for OO
3.x- when converting MS => ODF
"exotic" language information gets lost. (By the way: OO 3.x keeps the
language information of MS
documents even if the language codes are not known!!!)
> The problem with this approach is ... which in the case of
automatically assigned LangIDs is more a
> problem for MS file formats than the ISO codes for ODF files, that at
least have a defined value.
I see no problem in the fact that such language IDs will only be
available for the ODF formats and not for
MS formats. It is an advantage of the ODF over the MS formats that any
language with ISO code is
supported (although this feature of ODF is currently not supported by
OpenOffice).
Thanks for reading.
Martin
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected]
For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
