Re: SVG cards

[David Bellot <bellot stat berkeley edu>]

> Be careful here, many have nasty little clauses that are GPL
> incompatible (at least in their first batch, I don't know if their
> recent revisions change anything). Even the attribution licenses, which
> seem broadly compatible, have details which make it unpleasant. LGPL is
> a little strange in this context, but is guaranteed to be GPL
> compatible. 
>  
I don't plan to change the license before the 2.0 version. If LGPL is 
good for gnome-games, kde-games, and all those GPL/LGPL softwares, then 
it is good me too.

> Ideally this should be done by librsvg. I mean, I could run the SVG
> through an locale-selected XSLT script at runtime and then load it with
> gdk-pixbuf, but thats ugly. I would like to just load it into a pixbuf
> (as I currently do) and have the SVG loader do everything. I haven't
> looked at librsvg to see if this is possible/done already. I suppose it
> could be as trivial as running any strings through gettext as they are
> read by the SVG loader, but that could lead to some unexpected things
> happening given that text carefully laid out in one language may not be
> in the next. SVG itself doesn't seem to have any i18n/l12n capability
>  
I think we could use a xslt transformation. You're right, the problem is 
not to change the letters. The problem is that the position (and 
sometimes the size) of the letters have to be different depending on the 
language. This is why I made the same cards for french and english and I 
converted characters to curves.
The files are bigger but the result is always the same on every platform.
The most important to me was to obtain a nice look for my cards.

> The other point of view says that a French style deck should have French
> markings for the same reason we don't translate the mahjongg tiles into
> English or anything else, it just wouldn't be the same.
>  
Yes, that's true. But, after all ;-), people like to have things in 
their own language. I have a long experience in this domain as I'm also 
the leader of the french translation of Mozilla. And people want to read 
english if they speak english and german if they're from germany (or 
austria and so on...).

Ideally, the best thing would be to have a template for my cards and 
instantiate each card using a small xml file, a xslt stylesheet a the 
svg template. But for the artistic point of view, it's definitely easier 
to draw one card and to ctrl+c ctrl+v the card with illustrator and 
inkscape ;-).

David