Re: Uppercase in Hotkeys & menus

[David Martin <dmartina excite com>]

Hmm... I could understand the time shortage but the automatic thing seems
too poor for me.

The idea of my patch was to have some GUI fixes before what seems to be a
"semi stable" release supposed to take the place of 4.1.36 (even when it
can't ftp Mcafee's site :) Most people is using translations and is not
involved, but as there's no English l18n some people have 
to use the original C/POSIX mc and they would like some tidying of menus
(which is already done this same way in the translations I've checked).

On Wed, 15 Aug 2001 19:07:58 -0400 (EDT), Pavel Roskin wrote:

|  
|  I'm sorry, but this should be done programmatically in my opinion.
|  Translators should deal with plain text, without ampersands, spaces for
|  alignment and strangely capitalized letters.  Function keys should be
|  translated separately.
|  
|  I suggest that we use the same hotkeys in all translations.  I learned
"F9
|  C C" since Norton Comander and I want it to work in every translation.
|  MC should highlight the hotkey in the translated text if it can find it.
|  

I disagree.
- It can't be done in short (say for 4.5.55)
- Shortcuts (in the right of the menu) are used even when the menu is not in
screen, and they should be well known (and set by programmers). It won't be
hard as I remember I did a patch to translate menu's only once (not
everytime) and that seems a good bottleneck to do that. But, what if the
translator (say, the language) wants the shortcut on the left, or whereever?
Can we deal with all choices?
- Hotkeys are not that important. You're used to F9 C C, but there's people
who have been using our translations for ages and they got used to different
things. How many different languages do you use at a time? Nevertheless,
hotkeys are just a way to make every option usable from the keyboard without
using arrow keys. You can't automatically set hotkeys as you don't even know
if such key even exist in any language.
- It's hard to choose the Hotkey for each menu as there are some long menus
and the number of "single char keys used" is limited. It's the translator
the only one who can make the best choice. It's hard, but it would be harder
the other way. 

|  If you want to capitalize hotkeys, do it programmatically, too.  This is
a
|  lot of work, I know.  But currently the following texts have to be
|  translated separately into 30 languages:
|  
|  "&New              C-n"
|  "&New            C-x k"
|  
I don't care for C-n and C-x k. Think of

new             XXX
nn              XXX
nnn             XXX


|  Put yourself in a position of a translator without much knowledge about
|  our ugly menu system, and imagine his or her frustration.
|  

I do that quite often and I read their lists.

Time for lunch. I'll take the time shortage argument.
I'll go for my es.po and es_ES.po this evening with
the latest snapshot.

*8-) David





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