From: Dan K. <da...@ch...> - 2003-02-23 23:42:19
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> > So, I'm wondering if maybe it'd be okay, while we're waiting for the > > German comments to be translated to at least transliterate them into > > 7-bit ascii. If Sam and Bruno haven't replied, they aren't paying attention or have no opinion. So though I am quite junior here, allow me to express one! I definitely believe that would be all right, a very worthy goal. Go ahead and do it, submit it as a finished patch. That'll force people to speak up if they have serious objections. As for how to transliterate, I'm not sure. You say that the "currency sign" is always followed by the "latin capital letter a with tilde", which makes me strongly suspect that you're not viewing the file properly: why would a punctuation mark be used as part of a ligature? I did some googling for you and didn't come up with anything informative enough to use. I know that there are ISO standards for transliteration (which is a joke - to read fluidly, a transliteration must take into account the history of the word, ie which languages it has passed through "recently", rather than just its most recent form). Using those, however awkward the resulting text might appear to a bilingual reader, would certainly be indisputably correct and would not lose any information. Now to see whether by any chance they are freely available... ... I've now checked the ISO catalog and found that there is no standard for transliteration German to English because it is already written with Latin characters, albiet they have lots of accents over them. Here's something, proving that it pays to go past the first page of search results: http://www.ex.ac.uk/german/dict/output-start.html This shows how umlauts are equivalent to ligatures with E; that is, for any vowel with an umlaut (two dots) over it, you may replace it with that vowel followed by the letter e. It also shows that a weird character which looks like a capital Beta can be transliterated as "ss". A little research tells me that that character is #\LATIN_SMALL_LETTER_SHARP_S, oddly enough. So far, all these characters are in ISO-Latin-1, so you should in all likelihood be using that encoding to view German text. Ironically enough, my X installation is all set up to view Japanese text, and whatever I do I cannot coax it into accurately displaying ISO-Latin-1 characters (except for Opera which uses its own system). So I may not be able to provide much advice, here... ... Now that I look at it, #\currency_sign is in Latin-1 also. It sure does look bizzare. Maybe it so happens that the word it begins is always a written-out number? You should probably replace it with whatever the name of the German currency is, or even with the word "currency". Also have a look at http://www.tm.informatik.uni-frankfurt.de/~razi/steak/steak.html in case it's any use. You may have to pass the homepage through babelfish. | Dan Knapp, Knight of the Random Seed | http://brain.mics.net/~dankna/ | ONES WHO DOES NOT HAVE TRIFORCE CAN'T GO IN. |