Re: "Very dirty" localisation request for a rainy evening

[Brooks Moses <bmoses@stanford.edu>]

At 02:01 PM 7/26/2005, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
>Hello Hans, Today I saw a webpage of someone, who is very active in the 
>field of translation and localisation of free software into Slovenian. It 
>astonished me the way he numered the items on his webpage: (a) 
>approximation ... (b) Gauss ... (c) numerical solutions ... (è) solving 
>parabolic ... % [\ccaron] (d) ... This should actually be the only proper 
>way to number items in Slovenian, but you can imagine that nobody is able 
>to use that since the beginning of computer era.

As it happens, I've just been looking at the ConTeXt code for doing 
counters as characters, and it's really pretty simple:

\def\character#1%
   {\ifcase#1\unknowncharacter
      \or a\or b\or c\or d\or e\or f\or g\or h\or i\or j\or k\or l\or m%
      \or n\or o\or p\or q\or r\or s\or t\or u\or v\or w\or x\or y\or z%
    \else
      \unknowncharacter
    \fi}

(There's also an equivalent \Character for the uppercase letters.)

All you need to do Solvenian ordering is to put a \ccaron in the list 
between c and d, and maybe call the macros "sloveniancharacter" and 
"slovenianCharacter" to keep them distinct.  Then, when you want to specify 
a numbering format for an enumeration, you should be able to use 
"conversion=solveniancharacter" rather than "conversion=characters".

This isn't quite a complete solution -- ConTeXt has some more code that 
defines a \characters macro (with the "s" on the end) that keeps counting 
after "z", as x, y, z, aa, ab, ac, and so on.  Duplicating that requires 
only a little more work.

- Brooks