Solutions for Multilingual Literature by XSL Formatter 6,800 known languages

Agenda The Problem! Example of multilingual formatting Some of the issues/complexities Considerations in putting together a solution

Languages 6,800 known languages spoken in 191 countries. 2,261 have writing systems 5 languages are those of 50% of world’s population Another 100 are spoken by 45%

United Nations 6 Official languages –Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish 3 Working languages –English, French, Spanish

EU Languages 11 Official Languages –Spanish (11%), Danish (1%), German (24%), Greek (3%), English (16%), French (16%), Italian (16%), Dutch (6%), Portuguese (3%), Finnish (1%), Swedish (2%)

BBC World Service

Why worry? “THE WEB!” Global economy and the web has greatly simplified doing business internationally which has lead to the need to produce instructions, operation, maintenance and service documentation in multiple languages. Look around the hotel! Look at the attendees!

Why worry? (continued) You can’t always deal in just one language. Delays can lead to shorter time to sell Delays in delivery There is a need today to have parallel processing of documentation in all languages

Antenna House Has sold Formatter in over 20 different countries. This week I’ve communicated with people in 12 countries. (6 different languages and 5 forms of English)

Example of multilingual Antenna House’s XSL Formatter BIDI (bi-directional) Vertical English, Japanese, Hebrew, Arabic, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, and Korean (8 different writing systems)

Problems and Challenges How to create source –What character encoding? The first criteria is that computers have to be able to handle the character encoding. 80s and 90s this was a serious limitation. Unicode overcomes this limitation. –V3.2 handles over 300 languages. Unicode provides writing direction, line breaking properties and other specifications.

(cont.) What operating system? Fonts –Without fonts characters can neither be printed or displayed. –Consideration includes source, quality, copyrights, can they be imbedded in output?

XML and XSL make it possible to solve the problem of multilingual publishing.

XML XML has adopted Unicode encoding schema. Being able to have external files linked to a main file enables storing the text portion of different languages into separate files.

XSL – designed for global languages Offers means to specify writing direction Typesetting rules for each language can be specified using object and properties in XSL.

Issues Glyph Substitution –Change depending on whether you are writing horizontally or vertically –Arabic change depending on whether it is beginning, middle or end of word Punctuation –Japanese, complicated rules governed by where punctuation is in a line

Line Breaks Dependent on language Multilingual must implement by language –Kinsoku characters in Japanese, cannot begin or end a line –Japanese and Chinese break between any character –Thai breaks between word, but no word space

Line Breaks (cont.) English and other European languages can be hyphenated, but rules of hyphenation vary by languages. Variants of the same language can have different rules. With some languages when a word is hyphenated the spelling changes, when unhypenated the spelling reverts.

Summary Multilingual publishing is here. “Typesetting rules for each language can be specified using object and properties in XSL.”

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