Re: 2 little politically charged characters

[Noah Levitt <nlevitt columbia edu>]

Hi Sergey and desktop-devel,

You’re probably sick of my opinions about gswitchit, but
here’s another one nevertheless. :-)

Something to keep in mind, is that the “2 letters” represent
neither a language, nor a country, nor a region, nor a
script. They simply represent a keyboard layout. Consider
“dvorak” for instance.

Therefore, I think the way it works currently — draw the
name of the layout — is perfectly acceptable. The names are
mostly short. If you want to limit the space occupied, you
could ellipsize like “ca_en...“

For the size of the applet, I recommend you lay out each of
the layout names in a PangoLayout, get the extents, and find
the largest one, at startup. Then that (plus padding) is the
width of the applet. I’d probably center the strings within
the available width. I think it would be acceptable to
repeat this process when the configuration changes.

Noah

On Mon, Aug 11, 2003 at 22:49:47 +0100, Sergey V. Oudaltsov wrote:
> Hi all
> 
> Well, with all the heat of 2.4 release (spreading throught the entire
> Europe and UK, saving Ireland) - just get a bit of fresh air thinking
> about non-relevant little 2.6 problems.
> 
> So, there is gswitchit. After some discussions here it was desided that
> mostly politically correct default mode for the applet would be to show
> a couple of letters to indicate the current layout (sure, with keeping
> the ability to show the flags, but this does not matter here). Currently
> I am stuck with the problem WHICH 2 letters gswitchit should show. First
> I thought about 2 capitalized letters of the country code (ISO
> standard). But this would not be politically correct for, say, Indian
> states (like Bengali). Then I thought about the 2-letter language code.
> This is a bit better - but some layouts are still undistinguisable (like
> us,en_US,us_intl,gb).
> 
> So I am a bit stuck at this point. Technically, I see no problem with
> any solution - but I just don't want to miss. This will go not into
> gswitchit but into XFree (through xfree86.xml) - so this should be
> well-thought solution.
> 
> Just for anyone interested - I attach the full list of layouts in XFree
> 4.3.0 (don't be afraid, only 370 bytes:). And I would be grateful to get
> the list of 2-letter strings for the applet.
> 
> Another relevant problem is the applet size. Since 2 letter strings can
> have different widths - the applet size will be changing with the layout
> changes. This is not a big trouble (the difference is usually a couple
> of pixels) - but still a bit of UI unpolishness. Actually, I noticed
> same thing in the clock applet - its size changes with the time:)
> 
> Any ideas on this would be welcome as well.
> 
> -- 
> Sergey