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.”

Where to Get More Information

• www.antennahouse.com