GIMP menu items (was: Discussion topics for GU4DEC BoF)

[Ole Laursen <olau hardworking dk>]

Christian Rose <menthos@menthos.com> writes:

[...]

> * Formatting tags in messages (glade situation)

There's more to this than just Glade. There's the same problem with
menu items in some applications. For instance, the Gimp uses the full
menu path:

  #: app/gui/image-menu.c:199
  msgid "/Edit/Clear"
  msgstr "/Redigér/Ryd"

  #: app/gui/image-menu.c:204
  msgid "/Edit/Fill with FG Color"
  msgstr "/Redigér/Udfyld med fg.-farve"

  #: app/gui/image-menu.c:209
  msgid "/Edit/Fill with BG Color"
  msgstr "/Redigér/Udfyld med bg.-farve"

  #: app/gui/image-menu.c:214
  msgid "/Edit/Stroke"
  msgstr "/Redigér/Bestryg"

This is a real pain. All the instances of "/Edit/" need to
synchronized, and the translation for "/Edit/Stroke" and "Stroke"
can't be reused. And the translations have to obey the syntax so it's
possible to screw up. I've done that in the past, it's difficult
avoiding errors with such a large message catalog.

Sven, is there any chance this could be fixed? The Danish translator
would at least be very grateful for that. :-)

Perhaps it is useful for some languages to be able to differentiate
between menu items and e.g. window titles. Is that the case for anyone
here?

But even if that is the case, the "/Edit/" part of the translation
string should be stripped so that one could simply do

  #: app/gui/image-menu.c:214
  msgid "/Edit/Stroke"
  msgstr "Bestryg"

So the placement of the menu item should be decoupled from the
textual representation of the item.


I've seen this in a few other Gnome applications too, can't remember
which right now, though. We need to stop it.

-- 
Ole Laursen
http://www.cs.auc.dk/~olau/