From: Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Sep 10 2002 - 23:40:08 EDT
--- Dom Lachowicz <doml@appligent.com> wrote:
> On Tuesday, September 10, 2002, at 09:44 PM, Andrew
> Dunbar wrote:
<snip>
> > There's another tiny issue related to this that
> > came up on an i18n list recently. Sometimes icons
> > are needed which are bidi dependent - so a good
> > system will know to look for right-to-left icons
> > in any right-to-left locale. Our current system
> > is good but would need seperate icons for Hebrew,
> > Yiddish, Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, etc. I have no idea
> > if we yet have any icons which would be affected.
>
> I'm not sure if I understand this, or at least not
> how it relates to bidi in particular as opposed to
> i18n in general. UI toolkits suck as GTK+ and QT
> have long supported substitutable icons based on
> something like $LOCALE. Abi also supports this -
> you'd hardly want an underlined 'U' to be used in
> say, Russian, because the metaphor no longer fits;
> you'd want a 'Y'. If you could clarify your intent
> with regards to how this affects bidi in particular,
> I for one would appreciate it, and probably be a bit
> smarter because of it.
Generally, high quality bidi-aware software does a
complete mirror-image of the GUI. Both QT and GTK
now support this. For instance, scrollbars will be
on the left rather than the right but it should go a
lot further than this according to RTL usability
experts.
Well that's the big picture which is a bit scary and
we're probably not ready to dive into all of it.
But one little aspect is localized icons. Just as
your Russian example illustrates different scripts or
alphabets, there are icons which will be wrong in
right-to-left environments.
The first one I can see is the icons for creating
numbered and bulleted lists.
In a left-to-right environment they look like this:
1-----
2-----
3-----
o-----
o-----
o-----
In a right-to-left environment they ought to look like
this:
-----1
-----2
-----3
-----o
-----o
-----o
The increase/decrease indent icons are probably an
even better example because they actually have little
arrows pointing in the opposite direction that the
text will move on an Arabic system.
Okay now all of these little glitches can be fixed
with our current system but care has to be taken to
do the work for each individual language as it's
needed.
Our system is a little haphazard whereby we created
icons with whatever name we like and reference them
individually in i10n files.
For example, the Russian bold icon is
tb_text_bold_rus.xpm whereas the Spanish bold icon is
tb_text_bold_N.xpm
A slick approach would use a fallback system based on
the locale with standard filenames:
tb_text_bold_ru.xpm (Russian)
tb_text_bold_es.xpm (Spanish)
We can trivially extend this to regions:
tb_text_bold_en_us.xpm (US English)
tb_text_bold_en_gb.xpm (UK English)
(I couldn't think of an actual example)
And further to:
tb_lists_bullets_ar_eg.xpm (Egyptian Arabic)
tb_lists_bullets_ar.xpm (any Arabic)
tb_lists_bullets_rtl.xpm (any right-to-left lang)
tb_lists_bullets.xpm (any other lang)
Anyway that's an ideal design for some day in the
future. No need to drop everything and rush into it
(:
Andrew Dunbar.
> Cheers,
> Dom
>
=====
http://linguaphile.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/translator.pl http://www.abisource.com
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