Re: language-chooser
On Sat, Jan 08, 2000 at 01:34:50AM +0300, Michael Sobolev wrote:
> [ 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.
I do not know how common it is in for other languages, but many words in
Polish language which contain Polish national characters may be written in
such way, that ASCII characters will be put in their places. For instance
there is a letter in polish alphabet which looks like "z" with a dot above
it, and might be replaced by a pure "z" in such circumstances. It is still
very common to use ASCII characters only in Polish texts if one isn't sure
if all readers' systems support the very encoding (there are a few).
Also the name of Polish langauage in Polish - "polski" does not contain
non-ascii characters, what might be a nice feature.
regards,
Marcin
--
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Marcin Owsiany
porridge@pandora.info.bielsko.pl
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