[tex-live] merging texmf-doc into texmf-dist

[Arthur Reutenauer]

> To ease the needs of programs that might support languages in the
> future, there can be a strict name convention, e.g. prefixing
> lang directories by "lang-" and the same naming system for the
> language names as used for language.dat/hyph-utf8 could be used:
>   lang-en, lang-pl, ...

  Glad to know we have some influence :-)

  The language tags are the IETF tags defined in RFC 4646
(http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4646.txt), that build on different ISO
standards (ISO 639 for language codes, ISO 15924 for script codes, and
of course ISO 3166 for country codes).  It has enough granularity
to identify all the languages for which TeX Live had hyphenation
patterns, e.g., British English and American English (en-GB and en-US),
Polytonic Greek and Monotonic Greek (el-polyton and el-monoton), or
"old" and "new" German spelling (de-1901 and de-1996).

  The RFC comes with a "Language Tag Repository" maintained by the IANA
(http://www.iana.org/assignments/language-subtag-registry).  That's
where tags like "el-polyton" and "de-1996" are defined.  I wrote a few
paragraphs about these tags in my TUGboat article about hyph-utf8
(http://tug.org/tex-hyphen/tb93miklavec.pdf).

  In relation to TeX Live, one of the points that I've been trying to
make without success is that "zh-CN" is a misnomer for "Simplified
Chinese": it should be "zh-Hans" ('Hans' is exactly the ISO 15924 code
for "Simplified Chinese characters"), unless one really means "Chinese
from Mainland China", which shouldn't happen in most cases, I think (in
particular for the TeX Live docs).

  Note that RFC 4646 currently undergoes heavy revision, but the tags we
used will of course be valid under the new RFC.

	Arthur

P-S: Heiko, will you be in Vienna for DANTE next week?