Re: [docbook-apps] Language support in XSL-FO Stylesheets

[Mike Maxwell <mmaxwell@umd.edu>]

This is probably not relevant to your cases, but we typeset and 
published (through Mouton) a number of grammars ten or so years ago, 
where the languages being described had unusual scripts: Western Panjabi 
(Nasta'liq variety of Arabic script, hence right-to-left), Bangla 
(Bengali script), and Dhivehi (Thaana script, also right-to-left), and 
Pashto (Naskh variety of Arabic script).  But we were using dblatex 
(http://dblatex.sourceforge.net) to convert our DocBook source to 
XeLaTeX (a Unicode-aware version of LaTeX).

   Mike Maxwell
   University of Maryland

On 6/23/2022 10:35 AM, M. Downing Roberts wrote:
> Hi Frank,
>
> I can't add much except to say that I also hit a wall trying to generate 
> a bilingual book (English and Japanese), and the index in particular was 
> very difficult.
>
> I got some help from Bob Stayton, but the only solution was a hack to 
> generate the index using another application that I wrote, which 
> massaged the XSL-FO.
>
> The problem, including more detail from Bob, is recorded in this GitHub 
> issue: https://github.com/docbook/xslt10-stylesheets/issues/238 
> <https://github.com/docbook/xslt10-stylesheets/issues/238>
>
> All best,
>
> M. Roberts
>
> On Thu, Jun 23, 2022 at 11:07 PM Frank Steimke 
> <f-steimke@berger-und-steimke.de 
> <mailto:f-steimke@berger-und-steimke.de>> wrote:
>
>     Dear List Members,
>
>     i had already sent this to the docbook List, but probably this list
>     docbook-apps fits better.
>
>     I am using DocBook for a bi-lingual book. Most of the content is
>     written in english, but parts are written in the german language.
>     PDF is produced with XSL Stylesheets 1.79.2 shipped within Oxygen 24
>     and the Antenna House Formatter v7.
>
>     Since most content is english, /book/@xml:lang is 'en'. Fragments in
>     german have @xml:lang='de' at the appropriate level, e. g. for
>     section or note elements. Sometimes i have phrase or emphasis
>     elements only because of the @xml:lang attribute.
>
>     Observation is, that hyphenation is wrong in the PDF Document for
>     the german fragments. I think i have found the reason, but i am
>     puzzled. There are two issues which i can't understand:
>
>     1) There is a template named "language.attribute" in I10n.xsl. It
>     calculates the language value looking at the ancestor axis, and
>     emits an attribute named @lang with that value. *First Issue: *the
>     name of the attribute is wrong, the correct name is @language. See
>     section 7.10.2 "Language" <https://www.w3.org/TR/xsl11/#language> 
>     in Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) Version 1.1.
>
>     2) The template named "language.attribute" is rarely used. *2nd
>     Issue: *I had to create a customization layer for the templates that
>     matches d:para or d:simpara, which do emit an fo:block element, so
>     that they call the language.attribute template. Same for d:phrase
>     and d:emphasis in inline.xsl
>
>     Maybe i have missed something obvious. Are there any reasons for
>     this lack of language support?
>
>     Sincerely, Frank Steimke

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