[haible@ilog.fr: Re: UTF-8 Locales in Linux Distributions]

[Noah Levitt <nlevitt columbia edu>]

For gnome, we force the translators to use UTF-8 anyway.
Maybe when xgettext 0.12 is out we can change our policy to
allow UTF-8 msgid's?

Noah

----- Forwarded message from Bruno Haible <haible@ilog.fr> -----

From: Bruno Haible <haible@ilog.fr>
Date: 	Tue, 22 Apr 2003 19:33:01 +0200 (CEST)
To: linux-utf8@nl.linux.org
Subject: Re: UTF-8 Locales in Linux Distributions
Reply-to: linux-utf8@nl.linux.org

H. Peter Anvin writes:
> >
> > Sure. The problem is that the programmer has presented a non-ASCII
> > string for translation. Instead of doing this
> >
> >     printf (_("Author: François Pinard\n"));
> >
> > he should use something like
> >
> >     printf (_("Author: %s\n"), iso_8859_1_to_multibyte ("François Pinard"));
> >
> > See tar-1.13.25/lib/print-copyr.c; this file prints the copyright
> > sign, transliterating to "(C)" when needed.
> >
> > xgettext now gives warnings for non-ASCII strings that are marked for
> > translation.
> >
> 
> Ick.  This is way ugly... (_("Author: Francois Pinard\n")) would be
> less offensive (although offensive.)  Better yet would be to the input
> to be UTF-8 *only*, but saying the input must be ASCII
> is... troublesome.
> 
>         -hpa


This pushes the problem from the programmer to the translator: when
non-ASCII UTF-8 msgid strings occur, the programmer forces most
translators to use UTF-8. Therefore I cannot recommend it. But
xgettext 0.12 will nevertheless support this.

Bruno