Adding Languages to Writer's Character, Font Menu

[toki]

On 06/24/2015 07:54 PM, Richard Wordingham wrote:

> script for a barely supported writing system, let alone the class of script. My thought was that the language code would suffice. The script is
generally implicit in the text.

That is part of the reason why I think the whole Western/CJKV/CTL split
should be thrown out, and replaced with language/writing system,
supplemented by locale data.

Japanese, with five different writing systems, is probably the hardest
language to support, when keeping the various writing systems straight.

Turkish, with five different writing systems, probably has the highest
number of mutually exclusive writing systems of any language.
(Officially, two of those writing systems are no longer used in Turkey,
and the third was never used there.)

>With something like 2000 languages, the pick lists will be
overwhelmed.

I'll simply point to the current version of Microsoft Office, which is
claimed, by Microsoft, to support more than 7,000 languages.

As far as UI design goes, there are at least four options.
1) Offer everything, listed alphabetically;
2) Select the writing system, which is roughly 200 choices, then the
language, and then, when needed, the locale;
3) Select the writing system, which is roughly 200 choices, then the
locale, which is roughly 250 choices, and then the language, which, in
the worst case scenario, is a thousand options;
3) Select the country, which is roughly 250 choices, then the language,
and then, when needed, the writing system;
4) Break it into two or three menus, with the first menu being the "x"
most used languages in the world, and the second menu being languages
used in the country, region, time period, or other, that the user selects;

To me, it looks as if the original designers never anticipated OOo
supporting as many languages as GlobalWriter supported in 1995.

I don't know if it is easier to retrofit the underlying structure, or
start with brand new code that can be a drop-in replacement, knowing
that the latter will break existing third-party configurations.

jonathon

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