Subject: Re: POW -- which locales Just Work?
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Thu Mar 01 2001 - 12:25:57 CST
Karl,
Thanks for taking the lead on this.
Any chance we could also get you to whip up a locale matrix with a single
partially-green row? The rest would all still be purple, of course. ;-)
At 03:25 PM 3/1/01 +0100, Karl Ove Hufthammer wrote:
>No. Norwegian has *two* official written languages, Nynorsk (language code
'nn')
>and Bokmål ('nb'). Windows 98 was written before we got separate language
codes
>for Nynorsk and Bokmål, and therefore uses 'no-NO' as the name of both
locales
>(I don't know if this is fixed in Windows 2000). This means that neither the
>'nn-NO' nor the 'nb-NO' will work automatically, and you'll have to manually
>change the configuration file.
>
>The right (i.e. best) thing to do is probably to pop-up a dialog box asking
>which language you want AbiWord to use the first time you run it (for *all*
>languages, not just Norwegian).
Hmm. I'd rather not ask at all unless we have to.
Here's a modest proposal, assuming that the OS is getting the country right,
but the language wrong.
IIRC, our current logic prefers to match both the language and country. If
there's no country match, it'll take just a language match. Couldn't we
just add the other corner case? If there's no language match, but there is
a single country match, then use that.
The dialog should only be a last resort when there's still ambiguity for the
user to resolve:
1. no language *or* country match
2. language matches, country doesn't, several others available
3. country matches, language doesn't, several others available
One other nit -- in each of these cases, you have to decide which language
to *ask* the question in (and default the selection to). My proposal:
1. en-US (it's our default anyhow)
2. whichever locale has the default flag set in the strings file
3. toss-up (but all should be familiar to someone in that country)
Does that make sense, or is it being too clever?
>Some of the dialogs have truncated labels. See <URL:
>http://www.abisource.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=1046 >.
Thanks for filing the bug. As mentioned in my note to Vlad, this is still
an outstanding POW which needs to be addressed once for each platform. The
ideal time to do so is:
- before 1.0
- after the dialogs have settled down
A dry run before 0.9 might be nice, though.
>There is no dictionary available. Or rather, there are <URL:
>http://www.uio.no/~runekl/dictionary.html >, but I haven't been able to
>successfully compile a hash file for it.
AFAIK, the last list of known-good dictionaries is pretty stale:
http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/00/January/0230.html
Can you work with Jordi to populate this column so someone can fix this
puppy once and for all?
>BTW, I think it's a good idea to have locale-specific paper size defaults
(e.g.
>people using the 'nn-NO' localization would have 'A4' as the default size,
while
>'en-US' users would have 'Letter' as the default size. Is there a bug
report for
>this?
Two obvious hacks come to mind:
1. Ask the native locale mechanisms on the OS.
2. Add this as an argument to the strings files.
On a related note, if we're going to add any more locale-specific info to
the strings files like this, I'd also like to suggest that we also add a
user-visible name for the locale here (which does NOT get translated).
http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/00/March/0391.html
This'll come in very handy when we start implementing dialogs to allow folks
to pick languages.
>> 7. You can cut & paste content to & from the clipboard.
>
>Yes, even with Unicode characters.
Excellent! Does this work with other apps, too, or just inside Abi?
>But there are some bugs. En- and em-dashed (possibly other characters too)
are
>saved as ordinary *hyphens*. If I manually edit the document to use
– and
>—, the document opens and the characters are displayed as en- and
>em-dashes, respectively, but when I save it, they're converted to hyphens. I
>guess the answer to question 8 should be 'no' or 'partially'.
Ick. Please file a bug on this.
>It's been a while (~a month) since I tested this, but Linux documents
could be
>opened correctly on Windows, and vice versa. I doubt this has changed.
Excellent! I'm really looking forward to the day when this is true on all
locales.
Paul
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