vkbo
Extend project language setting
The current limited list of project languages is an issue when exporting to document formats. I think maybe the solution to #2328 in 2.8 RC 1 is more confusing than useful.
An alternative solution is to change the current Project Language setting text
From:
Project language Only used when building the manuscript.
To:
Project language Used for chapter titles and meta data in preview and manuscript.
And add the following setting:
Text language The language of the written text if different from project language.
The latter would be a text box that takes a language code, and previews what language the code corresponds to. That setting is already in the build settings dialog. The language code could potentially be auto-completed to make it easier to use.
Any feedback on this would be appreciated.
Project language Used for chapter titles and meta data in preview and manuscript.
Text language The language of the written text if different from project language.
These sound like a good change and addition.
You could also consider adding in this vicinity a link to the translation contribution, to remove confusion as to why the project language is a limited selection and to encourage more contributors.
I'm just not sure if having two settings will be more or less confusing than the way it's done now. The new override setting in Manuscript Build Settings is probably not very obvious, but this is also not a very frequently requested feature. It's also easily solvable by just changing the document language in the Word or Open Document itself afterwards.
This is kind of tricky in general.
It doesn't help that I can't really make a good language selection tool either. The language names are not translated to the selected GUI language. You have the option between displaying them in English, or each one in their native language. The latter requires that you use a GUI font that can actually render the native language name, and since there are hundreds of them, it's hard to find one that does. So my solution in the end was to have the user enter the language code.