ACL and Multi-Language Support
ACL can be used to augment and enhance the application you design for supporting multiple languages. Following are some of the ways you can use ACL to fine tune your application and make it more usable:
• Side-by-side viewing — Simultaneously navigate through two documents with the same content but in two different languages. You have two documents open in two separate Arbortext Editor windows. While scrolling through one document, click at any point in the document and the other document synchronizes to the same location. During translation, when changes are found in the source document, it is easy to synchronize the other document to the point where the translated material is to be added.
If both languages are in one document, ACL can allow you to display one language in the Document Map pane and the other language in the Edit view pane.
• Setting language attribute — Prompt for language selection and load the appropriate tools for that language, such as hyphenation and index collation files.
• Validating language attribute — Ensure that language attribute values are valid for the document's selected language. For example: you have a document that is in two languages. You use file entities in this document. So you have two versions of each file entity: one for each language. The top tag in the file entity has a language attribute. ACL can allow you to verify that any file entity included in the document has the language attribute set to the appropriate value. This prevents you from accidentally inserting an entity of one language into the document of the other language. You won't accidentally have a French section in your otherwise English document.
• Merging documents — Merge two documents into one document for side-by-side printing. You can author in two different language documents and print them as one document. The FOSI for printing would be set up for side-by-side printing, whereas the FOSI for the individual authoring documents would not. The DTD must support both languages.
Merging can be very complex if the documents are not identical: that is, if one contains pieces of data that the other does not. The merging process may have to be able to display warning messages or insert missing elements to achieve the desired results.
• Checking spelling — Use more than one spelling dictionary in the same document. This is necessary if you have more than one language in the same document. Only one dictionary can be used at a time. ACL allows you to select the language to spell check and to ignore the other language. This prevents the spell checker from stopping on all the words of the other language that are foreign to the currently loaded dictionary. After one language is checked, select the other language to spell check and ignore the first.
• Switching keyboards — Automatically remap the keyboard to a different language. This does not include 16-bit characters. They require a special operating system.
• Translating — Change bars can be added to track changes to documents. Translators can focus on only the areas marked by change bars.