Re: Thoughts and questions about input

[Pablo Saratxaga <pablo mandrakesoft com>]

Kaixo!

On Tue, Mar 14, 2000 at 01:46:30AM -0500, Owen Taylor wrote:
 
> > The correct way of doing that in the current X11 framework is to set
> > the locale to Urdu, then force menus to English; eg:
> > 
> > LC_ALL=ur
> > LANGUAGE=en
> 
> I certainly hope we can provide nicer user interfaces to this in the
> long term than setting environment variables. :-)

My point was saying that keyboard input and displaying/input of a language
in the data window is different from the displaying of the menus and
other elements of the interface.
 
>> The problem for languages written right to left is that no current gtk+
>> widget provides support for them.
>> Once Gtk+ text widgets provides support for it (trough pango probably);
>> then it will as easy to translate any programe to Urdu than to any other
>> language.
>> In fact the translations could be done right now; it is simply that it
>> will be wasted work; as they cannot be *displayed* currently.
> 
> It will be a while before RTL translations of GTK+ or GNOME applications
> are going to be useful, simply because that will require application
> authors to upgrade to GTK+-1.4; which will require us to release 1.4.
> This is not going to happen for a number of months more. 

I'm not saying it will happen just now; but that it is "mostly done", I mean
on the side of the general program author; they won't need much special
modifications; once gtk+ 1.4 is out, a recompilations should be enough 
I think. 

> But if anybody wants to to tackle the .po files for GTK+ itself (which
> are quite small), that would have immediate benefits, at least for
> the purposes of nice screenshots.

In order to write the po files a bidirectional text editor is needed, too.
Also, there is very few incentive for translators to do anything if it won't
be used by anyone.

Thait being said, I have several people interested in Hebrew, Arabic and
Farsi (Iranian) translating; I didn't followed HEAD bracnh of gtk+ from 
a while; but if it is a bit usable maybe making some special rpm packages
for people interested on RTL languages could be interessant, for them
first, as currently they simply have nothing but forced to use Microsoft
Windows; for us too as we would be able to receive meaningulf and interesting
feedback on RTL topics; and have a beginning of translations for nice screen
shooting.

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

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