Re: Fallback fonts in LaTeX export for non latin scripts

[Ihor Radchenko]

Juan Manuel Macías <maciaschain@posteo.net> writes:

>>> [...] any suggestion for improvement is very welcome [...]
>>
>> This is a bit too out of context. Improvement of what?
>
> I think it is related to the previous paragraph: "I am very interested
> in all possible improvements in babel so that it integrates as best as
> possible with automatically generated files[...]"

That's good to hear. In practical terms, if Javier gives us some contact
email, we may CC him when we think that what we discuss is related to
Babel.

>> We can also provide multiple language name variants though I don't see a
>> need to bother unless we get user requests to do such thing.
>
> I agree. I even think it would be a good point to also include the
> vernacular name of each language.

Sounds reasonable. Although, let's come back to this when we have actual
code to discuss.

> By the way, Javier has also told me that he is going to consider the
> 'onchar=ids fonts' issue related to the case of several languages that
> use the same script (already discussed here in past messages).

That would be nice, although determining language may not be trivial.
AFAIK, automatic language detection often relies upon word frequencies
(for example, see https://pypi.org/project/langdetect/) and cannot be
reliable for very short text fragments. In the case of texts combining
multiple languages arbitrarily, the problem becomes even more difficult.
In some cases (dialects), multiple languages can be valid for the same
text fragment.

That said, frequency-based approach can mostly work well, except certain
edge cases. But it requires word corpus. I am not sure how feasible it
would be to include into TeX distribution. (Maybe not very hard - it is
already quite large and a few dictionary files will not change much).

-- 
Ihor Radchenko // yantar92,
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