ID for language-invariant strings

Mark Davis mark.davis at icu-project.org
Fri Mar 14 18:36:57 CET 2008


Peter, the example really helps. I agree with you that zxx seems
inappropriate, since your example is linguistic content, but just intended
to be as neutral as possible regarding language. But I also agree with John
about the creeping featurism.

I don't know why 'und' wouldn't work for you. It signifies an undetermined /
indeterminate language, which really looks like the case you have there. And
that's exactly how we use it.

Mark

On Fri, Mar 14, 2008 at 9:52 AM, Nicholas Shanks <contact at nickshanks.com>
wrote:

> On 14 Mar 2008, at 5:07 pm, Peter Constable wrote:
>
>  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
>
> "微软雅黑"
>
> 1
>
> ??
>
> Language-neutral reference name
>
> "Microsoft YaHei"
>
> I need a language tag to replace ??.
>
>
> Like Michael said, as long as you're not using zxx in any other name:lang
> key-pair, then zxx will suffice.
> Consider if the value of the language-neutral name was unprintable as
> ASCII.
>
>
> — Nicholas Shanks.
>
>
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>
>


-- 
Mark
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