Re: text representation in gtk+ 1.3.x

[Pablo Saratxaga <pablo mandrakesoft com>]

Kaixo!

On Tue, Dec 12, 2000 at 11:14:48PM -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I think the plan is to just run a perl script that converts all the
> .po files to be in UTF-8.

I don't think doing that automatically is a good idea, a lot of po files
can be completly distroyed doing that: those using 8bit encodings not
yet recognized by iconv(), or whose tables have small bugs, or those po
files which have non-ascii in the msgid (in people's names for example)
and use for the msgstr a different character set than the one used
for the msgid.
using iconv() on them will truncate the file at the first unknown char.

For Chinese and Japanese (and any language not using spaces) there is also
the risk of producing unreadable stuff by breaking lines at the middle of
a char (as the conversion to utf-8 will increase the lenght of the strings
in the msgstr, the next msgmerge can cut them at the wrong place (that is a
general problem of gettext tools in fact; but also of the Gtk+ word wrapping
algorithm (unless it has been solved recently, on the versions I use
a Chinese or Japanese line is not wrapped if no spaces are present, that
may lead to dialog boxes several times wider than the screen...)


> 
> Havoc
> 
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-- 
Ki ça vos våye bén,
Pablo Saratxaga

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