Re: Use of UTF-8 triple points … instead of "..."

[Daniel Hartwig <mandyke@gmail.com>]

Hello

Martin Eberhard Schauer <Martin.E.Schauer@gmx.de> wrote:
> I was asked to use "…" (an UTF-8 character, German shortcut
> <ALT GR>+<.>) instead of three single points in my translations.
>
> Is it safe to do so nowadays? Are there reasons not to do so?

What about for LANG=C?

In the translations, a user has at least a hope of specifying an
encoding and gettext can (does?) convert as needed.

There is at least one program using this for status messages:

  Read request…

"Introduction to i18n" says this on the subject:

  Don't use non-ASCII characters for 'msgid'. Be careful because you
  may tend to use ISO-8859-1 characters. For example, '©' (copyright
  mark; you may be not able to read the copyright mark NOW in THIS
  document) is non-ASCII character (0xa9 in ISO-8859-1). Otherwise,
  translators may feel difficulty to edit catalog files because of
  conflict between encodings for msgid and in msgstr.

[1] http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/ch-library.en.html#s-gettext

How official is that statement?

Elsewhere in that document it refers to English mainly as "English
(ASCII)".  Should other characters be replaced withremoved from the
untranslated strings?

I can see that non-ASCII characters are not just a problem for users
and translators, but can also mess with one program trying to process
the output of another (which would set LANG=C to get consistent
output).

Is it safe to assume that LANG=C means both English and ASCII?

Regards