I forgot to mention which values of lang or xml:lang trigger right-to-left
writing mode. The current list is he (Hebrew), ar (Arabic), and fa (Farsi).
Also, the current snapshot for the docbook-xsl-ns namespaced stylesheets
should work for DocBook5 documents in those languages.
Given that I don't read any of those languages, I would appreciate feedback
from anyone who tries them.
Bob Stayton
Sagehill Enterprises
----- Original Message -----
From: "Bob Stayton" <>
To: "Muayyad AlSadi" <>; <>;
<>
Sent: Thursday, March 12, 2009 8:53 PM
Subject: Re: [docbook-apps] Re: [docbook] better internationalization issues
again
>I made another pass through the stylesheets for FO and HTML to support
>right-to-left text direction. The latest stylesheet snapshot has the
>changes. If you could test it on PDF output, that would be great.
>
> http://docbook.sourceforge.net/snapshots/
>
> At this point there should be good support for the global lang setting.
> Additional work will be needed for mixed language documents that set lang
> or dir further inside a document.
>
> Bob Stayton
> Sagehill Enterprises
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Muayyad AlSadi" <>
> To: <>; <>
> Sent: Monday, February 23, 2009 2:15 PM
> Subject: [docbook-apps] Re: [docbook] better internationalization issues
> again
>
>
> margin-start can be emulated with margin-$direction.align.start
>
>> as this is a big change and will appear in 1.75.
> fair enough
>
>> Thanks for the info on pre. Are you saying that the formatting of a
>> programlisting > element should always be ltr at the block level?
> yes, there is no popular Arabic programming language so yes, it should
> go from left to right unless one day I make one PL in this case I
> should override that manually
>
>> Regarding the encoding attribute, I agree with you that UTF-8 is the
>> right value, but we cannot just change it without warning. It could
>> create problems when an HTTP server's configuration includes encoding
>> information that does not agree with the HTML files. People have had
>> to resort to various tricks to handle the quirks of older browsers.
>
> I'll be fine with just including the docbook.utf8.xsl in archive file
> even if it's not the default, having it there for long enough time
> will do the rest
>
> and yes of course, when testing I shouldn't use any external css
> but is there a way to tell xsl to dump all it's bultin css [used and
> unused]
> so that I can revise them but doing the dump with Arabic and English
> locales
> then do a perl script then diff and the missing parts would show up
> and some other tactics
>
>
>
>> BTW, which rtl languages are you able to test with?
> Arabic of course, you should expect that we are the largest Semitic
> population although the media call us antisemitic this is ridiculous
> but it's something funny :-)
>
> Hebrew and Persian languages were included in the original patch
>
> I know that there are about a dozen of languages that uses Arabic
> alphabet but I can't list any of them except Urdu and Pashto but I
> don't know more than that [eg. I don't know locale iso codes] and I
> guess Urdu can also be written with a different latin-like alphabet
> (watch peacetv.org at the peak times for Urdu speakers I see that they
> write it in both scripts)
>
> Wow! it's nice to "meet" people like you from so far places!
>
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