Re: Thai Numbering in gnome-doc-utils

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Tue, 2005-12-06 at 22:14 +0000, Simos Xenitellis wrote:
> Shaun McCance wrote:
> >So that said, Simos, do you need Greek alphabetic numbering
> >to be supported by gnome-doc-utils?
> >  
> >
> We would love to have Greek numerals supported!
> 
> However, the current locale support in CSS3 [1] appears to be quite 
> suboptimal for Greek.
> The Greek alphabetic numbering follows the legacy of Ancient Greek which 
> adds three letter-numbers [2].
> Specifically, it introduces three letters (for 6, 90, 900) that shift 
> the letters to the right:
> 6, 90, 900
> are represented by
> ϛ (in modern Greek: στ), ϟ, ϡ
> 
> According to [1], CSS3 does not take into account any of those 
> characters and especially "στ".
> Therefore, there is the issue of correctness for 6, 7, 8, and so on.
> 
> In addition, CSS3 is not good with the capitalisation (changing case) of 
> Greek text, as there are specific rules that drop accents, and in some 
> cases this depends on the context (based on the word).
> 
> It appears that when CSS3 was being drafted, there was no feedback for 
> Greek :(
> 
> Therefore, it would be better for Greek not to use alphabetic numerals 
> through CSS3 at this moment for issues of correctness.
> For the record, I sent an e-mail to this CSS3 working group in case it 
> is possible to fix the missing letters. Thanks for bringing the issue to 
> my attention.

Well, gnome-doc-utils doesn't use CSS for most of its numbering.
It uses calculators built into my XSLT code.  It then formats
these using either stock XSLT number formtters or code that I've
written to handle a specific number system.

The exception is actual ordered lists in DocBook.  Currently,
those do use CSS.  There's also currently no way to specify
which numbering system to use.  It's a problem I'd like to
solve, but I'm not sure how best to solve it.

The primary reason I brought up CSS is that it appears to be
a decent reference for numbering systems which I may need to
implement in XSLT.  But as we've seen, it's just not the best
reference.

(It is nonetheless good that you've emailed the working group
for CSS3.  CSS3 is still only a Working Draft, so they may be
able to address the issues before finalizing it.)

So here's the Wikipedia entry on Greek numerals:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_numerals

Would you consider its definition of the Ionic numeral system
to be correct?  Would you prefer ϛ´ or στ´ be used for 6?
Also, I don't think I've ever seen a document with a million
sections, so I'm going to assume it's all right for me to
stop trying after 999,999.

Do you need upper- and lowercase versions of this?  Does
weird stuff happen when I uppercase the numbers?

The page also describes the acrophonic Attic numerals, which
look considerably harder to implement.  Do you need these in
any document formatting stuff?

--
Shaun