Re: [office] xml:lang settings. Confused.

[David Faure <faure@kde.org>]

On Wednesday 20 June 2007, Michael Brauer wrote:
> > 
> > Can we just discuss xml:lang please, fonts may be associated
> > but should be a seperable problem.
> 
>  From the user perspective it is the same problem. In mixed documents,
> you not only have to switch the language, but also the fonts and other
> settings.

But we already have the properties for "fonts and other settings" that can
be associated with a run of text. And some implementations (e.g. Qt) are able
to find the font with a given character without the need for the user to explicitly
specify a font that has that character....
But let's assume an implementation that doesn't do that. In that case (and only in that case),
I understand that the reason for this latin/CTL/asian split is that you don't want to have to 
specify the font of each run of text independently. However this assumes that the installed 
fonts handle all of the latin characters, all of the CTL characters and all of the asian characters.... 
which is not the case.
And even then the split only makes sense as a document-global setting (for newly written text).
For existing text it would be much simpler to just associate the correct font with each run of text
rather than having all three; creating new spans where needed, in mixed content.

So I think the latin/CTL/asian split is a hack -- a half-solution which doesn't fully solve the
problem and only makes it more complicated. I would wish it out of the ODF spec
(KOffice certainly doesn't have such a weird split), but then people will say again
that we are against interoperability with microsoft....

-- 
David Faure, faure@kde.org, sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).