Re: simplelist and non-western languages

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Fri, 2004-11-19 at 16:12, Christian Neumair wrote:
> Am Freitag, den 19.11.2004, 14:58 -0600 schrieb Shaun McCance:
> > DocBook has a simplelist element, which has far from simple processing
> > expectations.  When it has the type="inline" attribute, it's supposed to
> > be rendered as an inline list.  So this
> > 
> > <simplelist>
> >   <member>fe</member>
> >   <member>fi</member>
> >   <member>fo</member>
> >   <member>fum</member>
> > </simplelist>
> > 
> > becomes fe, fi, fo, fum.  Seperating terms with commas is pretty common
> > to western languages, but I don't know how non-western languages would
> > want this rendered.  Would it be sufficient to mark the string ", " for
> > translation, or do translators need more control?
> 
> ", " doesn't seem to be enough. At least for RTL languages, swapping the
> argument order would be desirable. My proposal would be:

Well, first, this is going from DocBook to HTML via XSLT.  But I get the
gist of the C code.  Second, I don't understand why you would want to
swap the order for RTL languages.  I'm not putting each member on the
screen at pixel positions from left to right.  I'm putting them into the
result document in document order.

Assume this sentence:

Here is the list: fe, fi, fo, fum.

If English were RTL, with no code adjustments on my part, it would be:

.muf ,of ,if ,ef :tsil eht si ereH

That is, they naturally reverse because that's how the document is
rendered.  If I reversed their positions in the document order, then
they'd end up going back LTR.

--
Shaun