ID for language-invariant strings
Peter Constable
petercon at microsoft.com
Fri Mar 14 17:07:06 CET 2008
> From: ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no [mailto:ietf-languages-
> >An OpenType font can have strings for family name (or other various
> >data categories) in multiple languages, but for good
> >internationalization design, what should be passed in programming
> >APIs or put in markup for purposes of selecting a font resource
> >should be completely independent of the current user's UI language.
>
> I understand.
...
> >The language identifier (for which I'm spec'ing the use of BCP 47)
> >constitutes part of the key used to index all of the string
> >resources in an OpenType font, so I need to use an ID from the same
> >identifier space.
>
> I don't understand. "fa" is your language. What "language tag" are
> you using to access the translations?
Let me give a concrete example, which should make this clear. Consider the Microsoft YaHei font: the 'name' table has strings for various data categories, and for a given data category there may be strings in various languages. Consider the data category Family (name ID 1): there are display strings for English and for Simplified Chinese. But we also want a entry that would be the Family name that gets used when the font is referenced in text-drawing APIs or document markup; it doesn't matter at all whether that's the English or Chinese (or some other) name. But it does need a separate entry in the 'name' table, and it will need a BCP47 tag as part of its key. Thus:
Key
Name ID
Lang ID
Use
Value
1
en
English display name
¡°Microsoft YaHei¡±
1
zh-Hans
Chinese display name
¡°Î¢ÈíÑźڡ±
1
??
Language-neutral reference name
¡°Microsoft YaHei¡±
I need a language tag to replace ??.
Peter
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