Quiz

The first question is (and I have no answer) how do people number their list items around the world ? I have tried to search but surely I didn't had the right keywords as I have found nothing

Also if you look to all the usages of the $string('alphabet', 'langconfig') language string in the code you will see that in all places it is used for alphabetic ordering (see for instance glossary) so this question me: shouldn't there be 2 different strings, one for alphabetic ordering used for instance when a list of all first letters for fistname and lastname is displayed and one other for list items ? Unless of course if in all countries the exact same characters are used for both usages (I would be very surprised if this is true !)

Also I wonder if all translations are correct for instance in some languages some accented characters are included in $string('alphabet', 'langconfig') but not in other languages (for instance in the French language pack none of our accented characters is included in $string('alphabet', 'langconfig') and that is right because we don't take them into account both for alphabetical ordering and for alphabetical lists). That seems strange, but maybe this is just the reflect of different habits in different countries.

The first example below, a Russian pdf document, uses local labels.

All other examples, from Microsoft and Google, use only  "a,b,A,B,1,2,i,ii"  in various languages.

Aeroflot - Russian - pdf document

The second list item label "(6)" is the russian lower case "b".

Microsoft - Hebrew

Microsoft - Greek

Microsoft - Arabic

Microsoft - Chinese

Google Docs - Russian

Google - Japanese

Google - Chinese

Wikipedia - Bengali

The numbered list labels of the references, at the lower left hand side of the photograph, are local "1,2,3,4" in Bengali.

Hi Tim,

As the Persian lang pack maintainer, I had asked that question from myself before.

What I have done for our local installations is to do some minor modifications and introducing these for lang strings to qtype_multichoice.php:

$string['answernumbering123'] = '1., 2., 3., ...';
$string['answernumberingabc'] = 'a., b., c., ...';
$string['answernumberingABCD'] = 'A., B., C., ...';
$string['answernumberingiii'] = 'i., ii., iii., ...';
$string['answernumberingIIII'] = 'I., II., III., ...';
$string['numberingstyleabc'] = 'a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j,k,l,m,n,o,p,q,r,s,t,u,v,w,x,y,z';
$string['numberingstyleabc_caps'] = 'A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M,N,O,P,Q,R,S,T,U,V,W,X,Y,Z';

• Keep as default only the existing labels, which seem to be used almost exclusively worldwide especially in the computer environment, for example by Microsoft and Google:
  
  • a, b, c, d... Roman or Latin* lower case letters
  • A, B, C, D...Roman or Latin* upper case letters
  • 1, 2, 3, 4...Indo-Arabic numerals 
  • i, ii, iii, iv, ...Roman lower case numerals
  • I, II, III, IV, ...Roman upper case numerals
  • none
• Add to the list of choices for "Number the choices?":
  
  • user defined labels: [α, β, γ...]

*Note 

a, b, c means exactly that: use "English" letters

The French alphabet is based on the 26 letters of the modern "Latin" alphabet, uppercase and lowercase (a-z, A-Z), with five diacritics (à, À, â, Â, ç, Ç, é, É, è, È, ê, Ê, ë, Ë, î, Î, ï, Ï, ô, Ô, ù, Ù, û, Û, ü, Ü, ÿ, Ÿ) and two orthographic ligatures (æ, Æ, œ, Œ).

The English alphabet also uses the "Latin" alphabet and is considered to consist of only the 26 letters a-z, A-Z.

In general, Moodle should support, at minimum, CSS3 numbering options as demonstrated here:

http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/pr_list-style-type.asp

and specified here (where you can compare browser support).

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/list-style-type

It shouldn't be that difficult to add additional languages to the CSS strategy using the <custom-ident> property and the @counter-style specification. Whether that should be at the school level or in the base, or at the course level might be a point of discussion.

Where the localization should happen might be relevant as well.  Ideally, it would be nice to have HTML pages in one language be automatically converted by the user browser localization.   Moodle needs to support the browser's capacity in the least obtrusive way possible.

From the perspective of the questioner, it would make sense to continue to provide the current choices and to support translation of  those to the course language.