Foreign languages
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Chapter I.4 Foreign languages |
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The easiest way to select a main language in TeXmacs is using the
icon menu. For instance, when selecting French,
TeXmacs will obtain the following appearance:
Similarly, when selecting Russian, you would obtain the following result:
Actually, foreign languages occur in four different ways in TeXmacs:
The language in which the menus and messages are displayed.
The language of a document. This is for instance important for hyphenation or spell checking. Notice also that it is possible to create multilingual documents.
The character font. In order to display text in non west european languages like russian or chinese, you may need special character fonts.
The keyboard mapping.
When selecting a language using the
icon menu, we use standard settings for these different issues.
Nevertheless, it is possible to refine these settings using
the Document->Language, Edit->Preferences->Language,
Document->Font and Edit->Preferences->Keyboard submenus.
Notice that the language and the font of a text may also
be set locally using the Format->Language and
Format->Font submenus. This allows the user to
write multilingual texts.
As soon as you selected a language environment, there will be natural keybindings for obtaining the special characters of that language. First of all, accented characters can be obtained by typing Escape, the accent, followed by the character. For instance, typing M-' e yields é and M-C c yields ç. Some foreign keyboards also provide so called dead keys with accents on them. Such keys allow you to omit the Escape in the above example. For instance, if you have a dead Umlaut key, then typing umlaut u yields ü.
In general, foreign languages also use other punctuation rules as english. For example, a quoted expression is written « Bonjour ! » in french, instead of ``Hello!'' in english. As a consequence, we provided the keyboard shorthands < < and > > in order to obtain « resp. ». Notice also that there is a little white space before the exclamation sign in french, contrary to english. We recommend you learn about such finer typographical rules in your language, which will enable you to write texts of a professional quality. Some more information for specific languages can be found below.
| Keyboard shorthand | Yields |
| , , | ,, |
| ' ' | '' |
| Keyboard shorthand | Yields |
| < * |  |
| > * |  |
| < < | « |
| > > | » |
| A-o A-e |  |
| Keyboard shorthand | Yields |
| , , | ,, |
| ' ' | '' |
| A-s | ß |
| Keyboard shorthand | Yields |
| A-! or ! * or ! ` | ¡ |
| A-? or ? * or ? ` | ¿ |
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Copyright (C) 1999, 2000 by Joris van der Hoeven.
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