Re: allowing an @modifier for documentlanguage locale-based argument

On Fri, Apr 10, 2026 at 05:25:29PM +0200, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 10, 2026 at 12:38:32PM +0100, Gavin Smith wrote:
> > > After reading some BCP 47 related information, such as
> > >  https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr35/tr35-76/tr35.html
> > > I am now wondering if we should not have instead a way to specify the
> > > script, directly, like
> > > 
> > > @documentscript latin
> > > 
> > > and construct a locale with @modifier for gettext translation retrieval,
> > > but also construct a BCP 47 locale name for HTML, DocBook and possibly other
> > > purposes.
> > 
> > I like that idea better, as, on reflection, we have too much tricky code
> > in texinfo.tex already and that would be much easier to implement in
> > texinfo.tex.
> 
> In texi2any, I think that using a BCP 47 locale internally would be
> better, with a conversion to a traditional XPG locale name when needed.
> There is a gnulib module, bcp47, that does the conversion from one
> locale type to the other.  I have found nothing in Perl, but it would be
> easy to do a simple code for that by ourself.

Again, what you might think as basic string processing may be hard to implement
in TeX, so please avoid allowing elaborate arguments to @documentlanguage other
than what is currently supported (it wasn't clear to me from your message
whether you were proposing to use such "BCP 47" locale names as arguments to
@documentlanguage or not).