Thomas Lange - Sun Germany - ham02 - Hamburg wrote:
Hi,
Harold Fuchs wrote:
...
Thomas Lange - Sun Germany - ham02 - Hamburg wrote:
However you can't simply define new language entries on your own. After
all those need to be available in UI as well, and that for example
requires translation.
Why does a new language have to be available in UI? Are you really
saying that *every* spelling dictionary has its own UI as well?
Because it would be utterly useless without.
What I'm talking about is NOT a localized office build for that
language. That one is indeed not necessary.
But how are you supposed to assign that language to some text e.g. to
get that one spell checked correctly if there was no UI for that?
In this case meaning a respective language entry in the Format/Character
dialog. And that one has to be translated to all supported office
localizations.
Thomas
I'm sorry but I don't understand.The way I'm thinking is that OOo reads
a list of languages from a configuration/resource file of some sort.
That list is used to populate *any* list of language names within OOo.
Each entry in the list has a dictionary file/extension associated with
it. When you select the language name from the already populated list,
OOo starts using the associated dictionary. In other words, the UI is
dynamic.
Oh, are you talking about the *name* of the language having to be
translated into the language of the current UI? Like "English" appearing
as "Anglais" in a French installation of OOo but as "Engelsk" in a
Danish one? If that's what you mean then it's easily handled. The name
of any language appears in any UI as per the dictionary author's
specification. The dictionary author can provide a possibly incomplete
list of names, one per UI language, **if s/he wants to**. OOo "central
control" can provide an authorised list of UI languages. It would be up
to the dictionary author to translate his/her language's name into as
many of those as s/he wants or can. If I choose not to translate my
language's name ("Martian") into Klingon then anyone using the Klingon
UI would see the name of my language in itself i.e "Martian". This would
explicitly also apply to alphabets. So my language's name might appear
in the Martian alphabet even for a user of the Klingon UI. The Klingon
user might complain about this but that would motivate me to find out
how to write the Klingon word for Martian in the Klingon alphabet and to
add that to my extension's resource file the next time I release my
dictionary (or even to do a special release for the purpose).
The same would apply to the author of a new UI. S/he would contact
dictionary authors and request that they upgrade their extensions to add
the names of their languages in the language & alphabet of the new UI.
So If I provide a new UI in Venusian, I notify dictionary providers.
It's then up the the author of the Klingon dictionary to update her
dictionary to provide the word for Klingon in Venusian and in Venusian
script; and it's up to the author of the Martian dictionary to update
its dictionary to provide the word for Martian in Venusian and in
Venusian script.
I assumed this was how things worked. I assumed that OOo didn't need to
know what languages it supports and that new spelling dictionaries and
new UIs could be added without software changes. I thought that was the
whole idea (or at least a large part of the idea) behind implementing
dictionaries as extensions. I thought it was a very good idea even if
not a new one (I implemented a very similar scheme in 1980).
--
Harold Fuchs
London, England
Please reply *only* to dev@lingucomponent.openoffice.org
