Specifying fonts for particular languages

[anne.bovard]

Hi all,

Is there a best practice or common practice for specifying a particular font for a particular language in Styler? For an unlikely hypothetical, say I wanted French content to be displayed and printed in WingDings.

Do I need to add conditonals in the stylesheet that are leveraged when my xml:lang is fr-FR? Or is there a configuration file that should be updated? I've been through a lot of the Styler and Admin documentation and see some guidance for when fonts that are not on a user's system must still be specified. And I found the bits about Combined Fonts. But neither of these areas cover my basic need to specify certain fonts for certain languages. What am I missing?

Thanks so much for your help and attention to this message.

Kind regards,

Anne

[GarethOakes]

Hi Anne,



I don't think there is any out-of-the-box handling for xml:lang. If you are
using Styler, this means you have to add conditions to every context that
can have xml:lang on it… yes, what a pain…



What you probably want to do for language switches is to set the font as
required and also adjust the hyphenation language to match. The next trick
is to ensure your generated text is in the relevant language, so update all
the places you are generating words eg. "page", "chapter", "see", "see also"
and so on. I think Arbortext 6.0 now offers XLIFF handling for gentext which
may help here.



Finally, in some cases you may have to adjust other stylesheet values
according to the active language. An example of this is adjusting generated
numbering and nested indents for lists to account for different characters,
I remember this being a particular problem for Chinese where the generated
list numbering could be much wider than the equivalent numbering in English
(eg. 12 => ??).



Cheers,

Gareth

[anne.bovard]

Hi Gareth,

Thanks so much for your reply. I'm half happy to hear I wasn't missing something 🙂 Conditionals, it is.

I'm using ufes for the gentext strings, but hadn't considered the impact of text expansion on anything other than note labels, so thanks for the heads up regarding lists and such.

Kind regards,

Anne