X-VM-v5-Data: ([nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil]
	["1251" "Thu" "21" "November" "1996" "15:52:30" "+0100" "Soren Sandmann Pedersen" "sandmann@daimi.aau.dk" "<199611211452.PAA17610@daimi.aau.dk>" "41" "International documents" "^Date:" nil nil "11" "1996112114:52:30" "International documents" nil nil]
	nil)
Received: from listserv.gmd.de (listserv.gmd.de [192.88.97.1]) by mail.Uni-Mainz.DE (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id LAA13208; Fri, 22 Nov 1996 11:56:57 +0100 (MET)
Received: from listserv.gmd.de by listserv.gmd.de (LSMTP for OpenVMS v1.1a) with SMTP id <4.B552E433@listserv.gmd.de>; Fri, 22 Nov 1996 11:56:50 +0100
Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE
          (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 278342 for
          LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 22 Nov 1996 11:56:39 +0100
Received: from daimi.aau.dk (daimi.aau.dk [130.225.16.1]) by
          relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.7.6/8.7.4) with ESMTP id PAA04761 for
          <latex-l@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de>; Thu, 21 Nov 1996 15:52:46
          +0100 (MET)
Received: (from sandmann@localhost) by daimi.aau.dk (8.8.2/8.8.2) id PAA17610
          for latex-l@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de; Thu, 21 Nov 1996 15:52:32
          +0100 (MET)
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL22 (25)]
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Message-ID:  <199611211452.PAA17610@daimi.aau.dk>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
              <LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
Date:         Thu, 21 Nov 1996 15:52:30 +0100
From: Soren Sandmann Pedersen <sandmann@DAIMI.AAU.DK>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
              <LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L
              <LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
Subject:      International documents
Status: R
X-Status: 
X-Keywords:                  
X-UID: 1772

When typesetting a document in a language other than English,
Babel does a good job using language-dependent things such
as hyphenation, quotes etc.

However, the standard classes are not really suitable for many languages.
Using my own first language, Danish, as example, such things as

  * The section numbers should be postfixed with a dot. I.e.,
             1. This is the first section
  * The margins are too wide, especially when using a5 paper

are not featured in the standard classes.

There exist classes which meet the requirements of Danish typesetting,
but then they lack other things.

Therefore I propose a new feature, \uselanguage{<lanugage>} which should
include a file <lanugage>.def.

In this file there should be a sequence of typographic rules specifik for
that language. For Danish this could be:

  *  \dotsaftersection
  *  \frenchspacing
  *  \quotes{>>}{<<}
  *  ...

The classes should then take appropriate action according to these rules.

The advantage of such a feature would be that class-designers other than
the LaTeX-team would be encouraged to include code to make the class look
right in other languages.

regards,
    Soeren Sandmann

--
Soeren Sandmann

e-mail: sandmann@daimi.aau.dk
phone:  +45 86 75 25 68