transalpin wrote:Mart°n wrote:I’m not sure, if I would like the language settings to be part of a character Variation ...
Martin,
whether you define a new style for each language, or just variations of the same style is up to you, the user, and has nothing to do with the suggested implementation. You could even change the language settings the
ad-hoc way.
Sure, it’s up to me, if I create new styles or use variations but pushing the language settings into character level, overcomplicates the whole thing. You’ve wrote, that you would like to see the language options inside the Character Style or Character Variations.
In one of my Style Sets, I have and use 13 Character Styles and all variations of all styles are already defined (but not all are used). If I take my normal-text-style (which is used for most of the content) and look at it’s variations, I have regular, bold, italic, bold-italic, small caps, bold small caps, grey and color and I use most of those variations inside the text. If I now like to add a language format, I have to duplicate this style for each language:
(English regular, English bold, English italic, English small caps…)
(French regular, French bold, French italic…)
(Italian regular, Italian bold…)
This would give me an incredible number of styles (if I have to multiply some of my other styles too) which would be hard to maintain. If I like to duplicate the whole Style Set and like to change the font in all character styles and variations, it would take an hour or more.
transalpin wrote:
The current situation, however, is unacceptable for anyone who writes in more than one language! At present you are forced to define a new paragraph style for each language
That’s true and I agree completely.
transalpin wrote:
So, the first step towards a more usable approach in multilingual word-processing is moving hyphenation to character level! There is no reason why it should remain in the Paragraph Style options.
And that’s the point I (still) don’t agree. As I’ve written in my first post on this topic, I would like to see a separate language style that could be set on a per word basis. Let’s look at a picture:
As you could see, there are many levels at which you could control some details of your text. The smallest level are Character Styles, where you could control every pice of a single character. It doesn’t make sense, to put language settings at this level, because the language thing doesn’t control the
appearance of a character like any other character setting and it should not be possible to assign a different language to a single letter of a word that has another language (as explained in the first post).
It also doesn’t make sense (as you’ve said) to attach the language settings to the Paragraph Style (where at least the hypenation-settings are located at the moment) as you may have one word of a different language in a paragraph of another language. So the solution is, to create a new Style Level right
between the Character Style and the Paragraph Style (as shown in the image) on which you could control the language aspect independent from character or paragraph settings on a
per word basis. You could choose your language settings ad hoc or via a defined Language Style, that’s up to you.
So I agree, that the language thing shouldn’t be part of a Paragraph Style but it also shouldn’t be part of a Character Style. I vote for a own Language Style.
You then could create some Language Styles
once and re-use them with every Paragraph- and Character-Style you already have or will create in future.
One should be able to attach a Language Style to a Paragraph- or Section-Style as you may use different hyphenation-settings with different paragraph- or column settings and it could be a mess to adjust the Language Style every time you change your Paragraph- or Section-Style (I think that’s the reason, why the hyphenation-settings are currently bound to the paragraph style).
I hope this clarifies what I really have meant.