Subject: Re: POW -- which locales Just Work?
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Fri Mar 02 2001 - 20:19:25 CST
At 12:46 AM 3/2/01 +0100, Karl Ove Hufthammer wrote:
>Something like this (attachment: locale_matrix.xml)? Since it's in XML, it's
>pretty easy to maintain.
Ooooh. Very snazzy. I'm not sure how it renders in pre-CSS browsers, but
it sure looks pretty.
The one thing that's still missing are details for the non-green cells. For
example, see the footnote-style contents of the other existing matrices:
http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/01/February/0369.html
A chart like this is most useful when everyone can tell what needs to be
done to make a particular cell or row or column totally green.
>Using the (attached) XSLT style sheet, we can transform it into HTML
>(attachment: locale_matrix.html). (We can create a XSLT style sheet to
transform
>it into an AbiWord document when we support tables! :) ).
Knowing Sam's penchant for XSL, I suspect we could even get these updated
automatically on the website, huh?
>No, it's of course best to let it happen automagically. But we will need a
>language tab in Preferences someday. People might want to run AbiWord in
other
>languages than their OS language, and manually editing configuration files is
>not a good solution.
Agreed.
>*After* having tried matching language, I presume.
Definitely.
>I think that should work. It's pretty obvious what you should do when you're
>presented with a list of languages anyway (choose the one you prefer).
Cool. So could we assume that we could get away with two or three pieces of
unlocalized text in this "locale bootstrap" dialog?
- a "Select language:" prompt at the top,
- perhaps an optional "More" button next to it, and
- an "OK" button at the bottom.
I can't think of how to make it any more self-explanatory than that.
>The 'dumpstrings' perl script shows how much longer than the en-US strings
each
>localized string is, BTW. This will probably be useful. (Though it only
counts
>*characters*, so IIIII is longer than WWWW.)
Yep. I wrote that POW. ;-)
>>1. Ask the native locale mechanisms on the OS.
>
>If this information is available.
Of course.
>>2. Add this as an argument to the strings files.
>
>Or a separate locale resource file. There are other things (defaults) that
are
>localizable too, and I think the strings file should just contain that,
strings.
So far, we only have one locale-specific resource -- the strings file. For
packaging purposes, I'd prefer to minimize the number of locale-specific
bits & pieces. And in any event, all modern OSes tend to include fairly
complete locale services, so we shouldn't have to do much to augment them.
>>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
>
>Good idea. This could be shown in the 'Select Language' dialog too
(perhaps in
>both translated and English?).
Exactly.
>It works in other apps too. I tried copying to and from Word several strange
>Unicode characters, and it worked perfectly.
Hallelujah! Now we only have four other platforms to test.
>I haven't tested bidi support, though (this wasn't available in 0.7.13).
Gotcha.
Paul
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