Re: [vntex-users] vntex and datetime

[Fool <fo...@gm...>]

On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 1:35 PM, Fool <fo...@gm...> wrote:

>
>
> On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 3:18 AM, Reinhard Kotucha <rei...@we...
> > wrote:
>
>> On 25 September 2010 Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
>>
>>  > On 25 September 2010 Fool wrote:
>>
>> Is Fool your real name?
>>
>  Fortunately no lol. It's an alias handle that I grow accustomed to being
> called.
>
>
>>  >  > Hi everybody,
>>  >  > I have this problem with vntex and datetime.
>>  >  > Please see the attached .tex and .log.
>>  >  > I've updated all the packages (texlive 2010).
>>  >  > What should I do ?
>>  >
>>  > This is strange.  It seems that whenever one switches to Vietnamese
>>  > and than to any other language, captions and font encodings are set
>>  > properly but dates are still typeset in Vietnamese.  This leads to the
>>  > error message "Command \abreve unavailable in encoding T1."  it
>>  > doesn't happen without datetime.
>>  >
>>  > I'll report it to Nicola.
>>
>> I did, and she told me that the reason is that datetime doesn't
>> support Vietnamese and thus falls back to babel.
>>
>> Today I added basic support for Vietnamese.  The files are attached.
>>
>>
>>
>> Please do not distribute these files because it's an inofficial patch
>> and I'm not sure whether I did everything properly.  It's best to copy
>> the files to the directory containing the TeX project you are working
>> on instead of installing them in a texmf tree.
>>
>> I also reported a problem which is not related to Vietnamese.
>> Whenever the "long" option is used, the year is in British format,
>> independent of the selected language.
>>
>> I need help now from people who actually speak Vietnamese.  What I
>> have done so far is to provide the standard date format as already
>> provided by VnTeX, "Ngày 27 tháng 9 năm 2010".  It works now as usual,
>> you get the same results with and without the datetime package and you
>> can switch between different languages.
>>
>> With datetime's "long" option you get "Thừ hai ngày 27 tháng 9, 2010".
>> The year isn't displayed properly, but as I said before, it isn't
>> displayed properly in any other language either.
>>
>> Do Vietnamese write a date like "Thừ hai ngày 27 tháng 9 năm 2010" at
>> all?  The list of days of a week contains an entry "Thừ hai".  But
>> since datetime doesn't only format dates but also calculates the DoW,
>> it also makes sense to support it without the rest of the date too.
>> But wouldn't one then write "ngày thừ hai"?  This is difficult to
>> support currently, if at all.  I could define DoW this way, but then
>> the complete date would be "ngày thừ hai ngày 27 tháng 9 năm 2010".
>> This looks strange, though I have no idea about proper Vietnamese.
>>
>> Yes we do say "*Thứ* hai ngày 27 tháng 9 năm 2010", for example
>
> Hôm nay là thứ** hai ngày 27 tháng 9 năm 2010.
>
> is equivalent to Today is monday the 27th of September, 2010.
>
> (
>
>
>
>> A very similar problem exists in German too.  One would write
>> "Montag, 27. September 2010", but I don't see any way to insert the
>> comma after Montag in datetime.
>>
>> I think that the problem with datetime is that it tries to handle too
>> much itself instead of delegating things to the dt-<language>.def
>> files.  Languages are too different.
>>
>> Another question is whether the first word should always be
>> capitalized.  Currently \today expands to "Ngày 27 tháng 9 năm 2010".
>> But is it appropriate to capitalize the word "ngày" if one writes in a
>> letter, for instance, "Hà Nội, \today"?  Do we need two macros, \today
>> and \Today?
>>
> if it's in the middle of sentence it's not capitalized, but if you want to
> stress a specific point, say "Friday the 13th" then it's "Thứ** Sáu ngày
> 13", in which case it's sort of a proper noun.
> I don't remember any rule of the vietnamese language that specify
> capitalization or noncapitalization of dates. It has very loose
> grammar/structure/rules. The only rule is beginning of sentence and proper
> nouns are capitalized.
>
> So yeah maybe two macros.
>
>
>
>>
>> Most languages don't have this problem because names of days and
>> months are always capitalized and in many languages the date begins
>> with a number, hence it doesn't matter whether it appears at the
>> beginning of a sentence or not.
>>
>> And finally, I used the word "tư" for the number four, but I also
>> found "bốn".  What's the difference and which one is preferred?
>>
>> "tư" is roughly equivalently to fourth  and "bốn" is four.
> For dates it's always "thứ* *tư".
>
>
>> I hope someone can tell me more about Vietnamese date formats.  I'll
>> discuss it with Nicola then.  But I fear that not everything can be
>> handled by datetime in its current state.
>>
>> say if i do
> \newdateformat{mydate}{\THEYEAR-\twodigit\THEMONTH-\twodigit\THEDAY}
> \uselanguage{vietnamese}
> \today
> \mydate\today
> \uselanguage{english}
> \today
> \mydate\today
>
> then I would supposedly get
>
> Thứ** hai ngày 27 tháng 9 năm 2010
> 2010-09-27
> Monday, 27th September 2010
> 2010-09-27
>
> right ?
>
> At which point is datetime kicking in and which point is vntex(babel)  ?
>
> Thanks!
>
by the way, \twodigit\THEYEAR doesn't really exist does it ?