first baby steps with luatex

ok, I compiled the luatex beta and was puzzled on how to run this.

Then I found Luigi Scarso's answer:

what about
$texmfstart texexec --luatex luatest1.tex

What is texmfstart? No idea, but "wer sucht, der findet"

$ locate texmfstart
/usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.local/scripts/context/ruby/texmfstart.rb
/usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.tetex/scripts/context/ruby/texmfstart.rb

I do remember having played with context ones, but I do not remember whether I installed context there. Anyway, the .rb extension is for ruby, so

ruby /usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.local/scripts/context/ruby/texmfstart.rb texexec --luatex sheet06.tex

did what I wanted... mostly. It produces a .pdf but it looks very basic, the page numbers are on the top of the page, and so on. Well a good starting point nevertheless.

lost in multi-lingualization

I figured out that my multi-lingual dictionary needs a multi-lingual website.

In web-design as elsewhere, i18n is quite a pain: one has to actually think what one wants before going off and doing something.

For my web dictionary and its associated websites, there is one obvious requirement: the text on every page should be viewable in various languages.

There are interesting links on the net on how to approach this systematically: I have found the following particularly useful:

• the comments in W3C's q&a blog article Content Negotiation: why it is useful, and how to make it work


• the EURESCOM report Multi-lingual web sites: Best practice guidelines and architectures

When looking for a standard encoding of languages as strings, the three letter languages codes (ISO639-2) are quite enough (ISO-639-1 are the two-letter ones). Of course, despite the thing being a standard, there is some fun to be had with e.g. deu == ger.

Apart from deciding, which languages to support, there is also a user interface question, and for my website, I consider this the most important. In times of Google, content can also be found if your website has a lousy user interface, but since I am looking for something that is fun to use interactively, usability takes priority.

That is why I need to ask myself: how would one select between languages? I think the best is to go with a hybrid approach:

• have URIs of the shape domain/language-code/path and rewrite them to domain/path.language-code.extension (the dispatching described in the comments to the W3C article).


• additionally have a footer with links (view page in language1, ..., languageN)

Pages should not be very long, so that the footer is visible. For added fun, I can later go into having facebook's wall-to-wall (two pages displayed side-by-side) layout to see the same page in two different languages, for translation and language-learning.