Subject: Re: POW -- which locales Just Work?
From: Karl Ove Hufthammer (huftis@bigfoot.com)
Date: Sat Mar 03 2001 - 06:39:54 CST
----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Rohr" <paul@abisource.com>
To: "Karl Ove Hufthammer" <huftis@bigfoot.com>; <abiword-dev@abisource.com>
Sent: Saturday, March 03, 2001 3:19 AM
Subject: Re: POW -- which locales Just Work?
> 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
That's why I chose this XML format. Now we can type:
<cell value="no">When printing Unicode characters, the ...</cell>
This will need some minor modifications of the XSLT style sheet. I'll fix this
today.
> 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.
Yes.
> >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
If this has the text 'More >>' (note the '>>'), I guess most people will
understand what it's for.
> - an "OK" button at the bottom.
>
> >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.
And the help files, of course.
> 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.
I guess you're right.
BTW, some day (~AbiWord 2.0?) we'll need to package each localization into
separate downloadable language packs. Having each localization embedded in the
program will take up way to much space (for comparison, the text of one
localization of MS Word takes up ~1.5 MB -- we have 25 working localizations).
--#
Karl Ove Hufthammer
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