Martin Vermeer wrote:
I have two questions about latex_language:
1)is it true that all it does is prevent the text from being spell
checked (and bluelined)? And
2) is is also true that it differs from ignore_language in that the
latter means that language _changes_ are ignored ... meaning that, if
you have a piece of ignore_language text in the middle of French, it
will be spell checked as French text, but if you have a piece of
_latex_language text in the same place, it will not?
Would it be a good idea to rename latex_language to no_language?
It is usable in all places where code-like stuff is being included.
Generally only natural language should be spell checked.
- Martin
Hi!
I'm still not sure what the original idea behind latex_language was, but
here are some thoughts based on what I've seen:
1. Spelling should *not* be mixed up with languages --- these are two
separate properties of text. Knowing the language is necessary for latex
to correctly typeset many languages. So if I want to mark some text in
such a language to not be spell-checked, and I do that by switching that
text's language to "no-spellcheck", it will no longer be typeset
correctly (because the language information was lost). Therefore, if we
want to provide "no-spelling", that needs to use a mechanism separate
from language. (The reason that we still get confused with this, is that
the language *does* affect spellchecking: once it's determined that
spellchecking should take place, then the language is used to determine
which dictionary should be used for the spellchecking; and if there's no
dictionary for that language, no spellchecking can occur. However, using
this in order to prevent spellchecking is an abuse, and will not work in
the general case, as I just explained.)
So let's leave spellchecking out of this now. If we determine that
latex_language is ever (or only?) being used to prevent spell-checking,
then that's wrong, and should ultimately be replaced with a mechanism
aimed specifically at spell-check prevention.
2. Currently, I think that latex_language's main use may be to force a
latin encoding/alphabet. For example, when adding ERT to a Hebrew
document, I have to switch to some kind of latin alphabet, because latex
commands are in this encoding even for Hebrew documents. However,
telling the user to switch to, say, English, inside ERT in order to
achieve this is a little funny, because she's not really switching to
English! So latex_language provides a way of forcing the encoding to
latin, without specifying any natural language, which would be wrong.
To be more practical, these are the "services" which I think we need,
and are currently provided by latex_language:
*) ignoring spelling --- definitely we should use a dedicated mechanism
for this, *not* latex_language. I actually attached a patch which does
this (at a low level, high-level use-cases could be built on top of
this) to one of the spell-checking bugs in bugzilla.
*) a way to force the GUI (and the generation of the latex file?) to use
the latin1 encoding, without specifying a specific natural language.
Possibly the best way to find out what else latex_language is being used
for is to get rid of it altogether, and see what breaks (I'm more than
half-serious!). Things most certainly *will* break --- but most of those
things should probably be fixed using a mechanism other than
latex_language. The question is if you want to do this now or just leave
it for now. However, I would *not* expand the use of latex_language any
more than it's currently being used.
Hope this is somewhat helpful...
Dov
