Re: text representation in gtk+ 1.3.x

[Pablo Saratxaga <pablo mandrakesoft com>]

Kaixo!

On Wed, Dec 13, 2000 at 02:34:23PM -0500, Owen Taylor wrote:
 
> > 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
> 
> Well, maybe it needs a little manual checking, or maybe the 
> script needs a little enhancement, but doing it in a basically
> automated fashion is the right thing to do.

I mean the old file has to be available somehow until the new one hasn't
been certified to be correct.
Now I think that doing a old_encoding -> utf-8 -> old_encoding conversion
and a diff between the original and the converted file would allow to catch
any file with problems (those without would produce an empty diff; if the diff
isn't empty that means manual intervention is needed)

>> 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 
> 
> It should be easy to make the Perl script handle rebreaking such
> strings - there is no need to make the segmentation linguistically
> correct, just to make sure that it doesn't split UTF-8 characters.

It would even be better if that could be handled by msgmerge (and adding
support for EUC too, EUC that is very similar to UTF-8 by the way).

> > (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...)
> 
> We have code now in Pango that should handle things well for all
> but a few languages. (Basically languages that require dictionary-based
> line breaking.)

What other languages doesn't use spaces when writting?
 
> For GTK+-1.2, there is a patch from Akira Higuchi that improves things
> quite a bit at least for Japanese - we ship this as part of the Red
> Hat RPM, but I've never applied it to the main distribution of GTK+,
> because I've had some doubts as to how it does on systems with
> less-functional locale support.

For Japanese (and I suppose Chinese too) you can cut almost anywhere, with
only a few exceptions:
- you can't end a line with an opening parenthesis (or any other opening
  paired thing)
- you can't start a line with a closing parenthesis (or any other closin
  paired thing), nor with a dot, suspensions dot, question mark, comma, etc.

> 
> Regards,
>                                         Owen
> 
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-- 
Ki ça vos våye bén,
Pablo Saratxaga

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