Re: Also... (Re: Amharic Experience w/GNOME 2)

[Daniel Yacob <locales geez org>]

Pablo and Abigail, thanks for replies and suggestion of the "xxxx (_F)"
convention.  I'm a little dissapointed that menu bar real estate has to
be lost though for non-Roman script languages, I'm surprised the CJK
users tolerate this.

Since I don't use the key commands for menus myself this is all a bit
new to me.  Still it seems there is some underlieing deficiency that
this convention is just working around.  A thought I had is to try and
hide the (_F) part and give the illusion of a native script key sequence.
Using the "_File" example, could a GTK tweak be made to support something
like "_xxxx __F"  whereby the _x letter is underlined in the menu display
but the actual keymapping is given by __F?  Yes, I would be willing to
work on this if GTK people would accept it.

In the meantime...a question that came up for me as I began updating my
.pos is whether or not to stick with the english mappings for menus or
to map phonetically onto Amharic.  For example "_Open" would become
"<k><f><t> (_O)" (where <x> is an Amharic letter) which maintains the
english mapping -perhaps good for experienced users.  Or "_Open" could
become "<k><f><t> (_K)" which maps onto the IM system a bit better and
might be more intuitive for new users.  Where has experience evolved to
for other languages in this respect?

thanks!

/Daniel


PS  For the curious, I made a snapshot that demos the state of the
    Amharic translations:  http://yacob.org/AmharicWorkspace.png