Documents with mixed languages

[Michael Lazar]

On Sat, Dec 11, 2021 at 8:31 AM Wolf <wolf at wolfsden.cz> wrote:
>
> Hello,

Greetings!

> I'm considering implementing a gemini client over the Christmas, so I've
> started to read the spec. And I think I've notice a missing thing in
> text/gemini format.

Many things are missing from the text/gemini format, as it was
intended to be a simple markup format. Instead of "is this possible?",
think "does this extension meet the power-to-weight ratio?".

> What I think is missing is
> an ability to set language for a specific part of the document itself.

Do you have any examples of existing gemini pages in the wild that
suffer from this problem? Or examples of pages that you intend to
publish on gemini? I'm interested in the real world use-cases (in
gemini) and not contrived scenarios.

> I'm not sure if the spec is permanently frozen or can still be extended,
> but I would like to propose adding a language toggle command to
> text/gemini.

I can tell you there's approximately zero chance of this being added
to the official spec. Your best bet, if you're serious about this, is
to go ahead and implement your proposal in your client. If others find
it useful they will start using it too (see: how titan is being
adopted).

> Not sure about specific syntax, basically anything would work, ideally
> something that would be not very disrupting if just render by clients
> that do not know about it. So for example:
>
>     Here are some examples in Japanese and Chinese:
>
>     !lang=ja
>     こんにちは。
>
>     !lang=zh
>     你好。
>
>     !lang=en
>     And back to the original language.
>
> This is just proposal, I don't really care if it is a switch (like mine
> example) or some kind of block.

This doesn't allow for mixed languages inside of a single
line/paragraph though.

> Now, why is this necessary. For Japanese and Chinese in particular,
> Unicode is simply not enough. Same code point can be rendered very
> differently depending on the language. So for proper rendering of the
> text, you need to know the language. If the document has just one, there
> is currently available way to do so (document language), but for
> mixture, it is simply not possible. And I think that is a shame.

I'm curious how this actually works with text rendering engines. Do
they expose an API that allows you to specify the language? Which one
are you planning on using, and could you point me to the relevant
docs?

>
> Thanks for considering.
>
> W.
>
> PS: I'm not subscribed, so please CC.
>
> --
> There are only two hard things in Computer Science:
> cache invalidation, naming things and off-by-one errors.