Re: RFC - keyboard shortcuts in Gnome 2

[Pablo Saratxaga <pablo mandrakesoft com>]

Kaixo!

> mån 2002-01-28 klockan 16.07 skrev Alexander Shopov:

> > The msgid has an underscore character before the letter that is the
> > keyboard shortcut.
> > So this will mean that on the menu the "E" character of the "Edit" menu
> > will be underlined and people will be able to get to it by pressing
> > "Ctrl-E"

Alt-E

> > 1. Will Keyboard shortcuts be dependent on the LOCALE? For example will

On the translation, yes, as the translator may choose (and in fact, it is
almost alwyas the case) a different shortcut.

> > I have to press 1 key combination when the interface is in Bulgarian and
> > another when the interface is in English? What about different Charsets
> > - CP1251 vs. UTF-8, etc.

different charsets are irrelevants.

However, for non-latin based languages the behaviour is a bit different,
I don't know 
may not be evident at first.

> The application shortcut keys, like "Ctrl+U", on the other hand won't. I

THose may be "translated" too; eg:

msgid "<control>U"
msgstr "<control>V"

Ctrl-U is used when no translation is in use, and Ctrl-V when thetranslation
is loaded.
(of course, <control> itself must not be translated...)

However, those are kept without changes in most of the cases (only if there
is already a wide practice of using a different shortcut for a given
function in a given language does it makes sense to modifiy it)

> > 2. Will Keyboard shortcuts be dependent on keyboard layout?

For latin based ones, no.

For non latin ones, the problem is that Alt-cyrillic_e won't be what is sent,
but instead Alt-<keysym in group1 at the same place as cyrillic_e>.

As the group1 is usually always the same: an US qwerty layout; and as there
may be different cyrillic layouts on group2 (eg: russian keybaoard, bulgarian,
ukrainian, bielorussian, yawerty, etc).
The result is that, yes, it will depend on the layout, as pressing
"Alt-cyrillic_e" if cyrillic_e is on different places will in fact send
different things.

Also, when the underlined letter in the menu is not an ascii char, I'm not
sure what the behaviour is (that is, I'm not sure what the shortcut is,
or even if there is one).

Non alphabetic languages, like Chinese, Korean and Japanese, as they have
no possibility at all to underline a real char used on text menus that
also happens to have a key on kleyboard, use to put an ascii letter in
parenthesis with to the text, and use it to uderline and shortcuts, eg:

msgid "/_File"
msgstr "/XXXXX(_F)"

msgid "/File/E_xit"
msgstr "XXXXX(F)/YYYY(_X)"

with XXXX and YYYY some Japanese or Chinese etc text.

Note that very important is to kept the '(F)' (or whatever) in all the
other translations of the same menu section; other wise it won't match
and there will be two menus: 'XXXXX(F)' and 'XXXXX'.
sometimes you can forgot about it, as there is no _ in front of the 'F'
on the second entry.

-- 
Ki ça vos våye bén,
Pablo Saratxaga

http://www.srtxg.easynet.be/		PGP Key available, key ID: 0x8F0E4975