perhaps i expressed myself badly so let me clarify a few things first before i try to reply to some messages that reached me via this list: a) when i asked for possible rules and possible "language dependent" items i was well aware that there are package around (for example Babel and also the KOMA-script bundle) that do try to resolve some of those issues. what i'm interested in is a hopefully large collection of those issues in an abstract way. so at the moment i'm not looking at implementations and interfaces (although i'm happy to see suggestions there as well like those already presented) but first would like to get an overview of the problem area (especially about those items that are not handled by, say babel or other package). My understanding is that we don't understand the multi-lingual issues yet (at least not very well) and that most solutions we have are the result of several software layers that have been developed over the years fixing problems when they appeared while trying to support older code as well. therefore i do want to look at the area once more without looking at interfaces at least not before the picture is a little bit more complete. b) there are at least two positions in the TeX world concerning "language". one group thinks that there is something like typography for language "foo" and therefore there has to be a set macros that support typsetting documents in "foo". the other group takes more the approach that there isn't such a thing but and therefore saying "this is is the German way to typeset \today is utter nonsense" and therefore everybody better defines \today as she damn please. My position is somewhat between those groups. I think that the traditional language style/package are probably giving the wrong message as they focus on "i'm the code to use for language foo" while in reality they might not be much more than providing a suitable starting environment that needs to be tailored. There is something need to provide defaults (i guess nobody will question this) and this something has to do with "language" --- somehow --- after all if i typeset in Australia then certainly getting a date with German names in it would seldom be right, so even if there might be many different formats there still is something that might warant a default. what that is remains to be seen that's why i said i would like to first assemble the items then look at the current solutions for them if any and then think about how appropriate they are and how others could look like. c) there are probably things that TeX can't do (or at least not in a general way without invoking the Turing machine theorem (that everything is possible in TeX since one can implement a Turing machine with it)) but even so such items (if any) could/should be mentioned. from Soren's and Richard's mails i do extract the following items (in a little more abstract representation) * for headings there exists certain traditions that require additional flexibility when specifying headings such as representation of numbers, certain text strings, positioning and spacing or even fonts * the typeset area and it positioning might depend on regional traditions (but even if not one might want easy ways to modify them) * commands that produce textual strings in some form depend on the "language" used in the document even if their replacement text is not unique, eg even if there is more than one possible resolution eg the \today example how much the above can have "suitable" default or only "reasonable" defaults or only "some" defaults for a given language is open to question but certainly the first and the last one are "language dependent" to some extend. The second is questionable (which does not mean that i'm not happy to have it listed, on the contrary) but the fact that Jan Tschichold influence German typeography a lot doesn't mean that his work could be only used as one(!) possible default for German documents --- after all he was responsible for redesigning the Peguin books let me add a few other items of my own (this straight off my head into the computer so this is neither sorted nor complete --- after all i'm asking you for additional items :-) * the use of hyphenation depends on the language (probably :-) --- just as an aside: in TeX the \patterns to use do not depend on the language but rather on a "language/font-encoding" pair which is an unfortunate fact of life not yet really taken care of * the use of fonts might depend on the language at least for high-quality typesetting. why? because different languages have different distributions of letters and so the gray value can change drastically if you use fonts from language to language using the same font (something that might suggest using fonts with large or small x-heights for certain tasks, etc). Or take the question of positioning the diacriticals. german.sty goes a long way to move the umlaut (of the cm fonts) into a special position "suitable" for German language * another thing where TeX is very bad at: the non-use of ligatures. this is culture/language dependent even if with MS-word and friends we might soon only have documents always without them * the position and use of punctuation marks, eg what quotes do we use do we put the comma inside or outside the quote * ... what else? i really would like to hear some comments and, if you have any, additional items that would make the above list longer and more complete. I think that email got long enough by now (you might think too long if you read up to this point) so i will reply to Hans Aberg's ideas in a separate message frank