In docbook one can specify
-the language used at the top, and the processing pipeline will use
-this information to pick the correct translations for 'chapter', 'see
-also', 'index' etc. And for most languages used with docbook, I guess
-this work just fine. For example a German user can start the document
-with <book lang="de">, and the document will show up with the
-correct content with any of the docbook processors. This is not the
-case for the language
-I
-am working with at the moment, Norwegian Bokmål.
-
-
For a while, I was confused about which language code to use,
-because I was unable to find any language code that would work across
-all tools. I am currently testing dblatex, xmlto, docbook-xsl, and
-dbtoepub, and they do not handle Norwegian Bokmål the same way. Some
-of them do not handle it at all.
-
-
A bit of background information is probably needed to understand
-this mess. Norwegian is not one, but two written variants. The
-variants are Norwegian Nynorsk and Norwegian Bokmål. There are three
-two letter language codes associated with these languages, Norwegian
-is 'no', Norwegian Nynorsk is 'nn' and Norwegian Bokmål is 'nb'.
-Historically the 'no' language code was used for Norwegian Bokmål, but
-many years ago this was found to be å bad idea, and the recommendation
-is to use the most specific language code instead, to avoid confusion.
-In the transition period it is a good idea to make sure 'no' was an
-alias for 'nb'.
-
-
Back to docbook processing tools in Debian. The dblatex tool only
-understand 'nn'. There are translations for 'no', but not 'nb' (BTS
-#684391), but due to a bug
-(BTS #682936) the 'no'
-language code is not recognised. The docbook-xsl tool chain only
-recognise 'nn' and 'nb', but not 'no'. The xmlto tool only recognise
-'nn' and 'nb', but not 'no'. The end result that there is no language
-code I can use to get the docbook file working with all of these tools
-at the same time. :(
-
-
The correct solution is to use <book lang="nb">, but it will
-take time before that will work with all the free software docbook
-processors. :(
-
-
Oh, the joy of well integrated tools. :/
-