[libvoikko] Regional variants (Re: More languages in the LO voikko plugin)

[Sjur Moshagen]

30. mai 2013 kl. 21:23 skrev Harri Pitkänen <hatapitk at iki.fi>:

>> that whatever language the LO Voikko plugin covers that is presently *not*
>> recognized by LO will just be ignored by LO for now, and will be
>> recognized by LO as soon as those languages are added to the LO list of
>> spellchecker languages. I hope this is correct.
> 
> Yes, that is correct. I have just wanted to avoid adding the codes into Voikko 
> plugin before they have been submitted to LibreOffice in order to avoid 
> confusion or false expectations.

Sounds reasonable. I wanted to add as many as possible, to avoid having to go through all the hassle with building the LO Voikko plugin for Mac, that's why.

>> I have also added two minority languages rarely mentioned: Danish in
>> (Northern) Germany, and German in (Southern) Denmark, just in case:)
> 
> This made me wonder if we really want all of these to appear as separate 
> languages in LibreOffice. I'm not a linguist so can't really know but from the 
> point of view of usability it is a bit difficult to use the language drop down 
> in LO when it contains really many similar entries.

I definitely agree, I have just noticed that this is the practice in a large part of the software world.

> The Voikko plugin has another mechanism that could be extended for this 
> purpose. We allow multiple dictionaries for one language known to LO. Right 
> now this can be used with private use subtags: fi-x-standard, fi-x-dialect, 
> fi-x-medicine etc. But we could change the code in such way that if the plugin 
> detects that there are dictionaries installed for "da" and "da-DE" but only 
> "da" is listed as a language supported by LO then these two regional variants 
> ("standard" and "DE") would automatically appear as options under Tools -> 
> Options -> Language settings -> Voikko.
> 
> How would that sound? After this you would not need any changes to LO or 
> Voikko plugin in order to have simple support for regional variants. Only when 
> you would like to select the variant for individual documents (or paragraphs) 
> you would still need to go through the process of adding a new language.

Sounds like a much better solution in general. Whether that nothing or all on a document level is ok with users, remain to be seen, but for now I think this makes a lot of sense.

> Of course a new language that has its own primary subtag will always need to 
> be added separately.

Sure.

Sjur