Re: multilingual tags

[Thomas PARIS <mercen mercen org>]

On Thu Sep 14 at 20:01 (-0400), Warren Baird wrote:
> One possibility that might be more reasonable would be to have dog, 
> perro, etc as separate tags the way we do today, but add some additional 
> information to the xmp data indicating that dog is an english tag, perro 
> is spanish, etc., and I guess it would also need to indicate 
> correlations, so if dog is deleted while english is the active language, 
> perro gets deleted as well.

Adding language info might be possible (I'm still unclear on this).

> I'm still not that familar with the xmp spec --- is there a way we can 
> embed info like that so that f-spot can find it, but it won't mess up 
> other apps?

No, there is not. The only thing would be the language alternatives
arrays I've already mentionned, but apparently they can't be used for
keywords.

So it might be possible to store the language info, but it would be
useless because it couldn't be used to tell which keywords really are
the same but in different languages.

To make it a bit clearer, adding language info would be having two
keywords:
* dog (en)
* perro (es)

where the language info part is not part of the name of the tag, but
more like meta-metadata.

Whereas the language alternatives array would be one keyword with two
translations:
  -- dog (default)
 /
*--- dog (en)
 \
  -- perro (es)

XMP explicitely allows this kind of construct for some of the fields but
not for "Subject" aka keywords aka tags (in f-spot).

> It's unclear to me how you'd produce a sane GUI for this, I must admit...

I had some ideas I wanted to try and develop, but if XMP doesn't support
this, it's probably better to just give up and either use only one
language or create different tags for the different languages
(maintenance nightmare for the user though...).

Cheers,
Thomas "mercen" PARIS

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