Re: language-chooser

[Michael Sobolev <mss@transas.com>]

[ I am back from vacation. :) ]

On Mon, Jan 03, 2000 at 06:44:18PM +0100, Hartmut Koptein wrote:
>  we should remove all language dependency words/sentences -- mainly 
>  english in the start menu. 
> 
>  From lc.c:
> 
>      // 2 -- main window borders
>     // 2 -- listbox border
>     // 4 -- spaces
>     width = max (25, width + 4);
> 
>     newtCenteredWindow (width, 14, "Choose The Language");
>                                     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> 
> Please no top entry in the menu. 
> 
> --------------
> 
> The selection should be in the native language, not the english one.
Hmm..  Good point.  There is a small problem though.

The current situation is by design.  My assumption was: 
    -- that in any font we are able to display us-ascii (read: English!)
    -- we may want to use fonts other than unicode complete (in any sense :)

The dialog itself consists of three parts:

    -- dialog title
    -- selections (which are in English)
    -- help hint (which is in native language)

The dialog title should be readable for everybody, if it exists, of course.
It's a bad idea to make it dynamic.

Selections should either be readable for everybody (English?), or we must use
unicode font to display names of all possible character sets (even now we have:
iso-8859-{1,2}, KOI8-R).  Using unicode font has its drawbacks:

    -- on standard vga console (on x86), we can use only 8 colors (that's
       the hardware problem of vga adapters)
    -- framebuffer support is not available for all platforms (using framebuffer
       does not suffer this "color" problem)
    -- we are limited to 512 characters only (the limitation of the linux kernel)

As soon as the user changes the language, the help hint shows an appropriate
phrase in this very language (and, please do not forget, before showing this
hint, the system font gets changed!).

My point was that many (this is the keyword) people know how the name of theirs
language is written in English, so putting something in English makes sense
(does it not?).  For these, it's a matter of finding English name of theirs
language on the screen.  Others will just have to browse the list with up and
down arrows until they find something readable in hint line.

To resume, I am going to try the variant with an unicode font, but I still
think that the list of languages should consist of their's English names.

--
Mike