[Monotone-devel] Re: very similar strings in L10n

[Lapo Luchini]

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Nathaniel Smith wrote:

>> Also, strings are quoted in various ways: often '%s', also often
>> %s without quotes, sometimes [%s].
> Err, yeah, we should probably pick some style for this.  I don't
> really know what's best.  Having _some_ sort of quoting is often
> nice, just to make clear what's going on in case %s turns out to
> expand to an empty string, or a string with trailing spaces, or
> suchlike.

In italian translation I'm just using ‘%s’... but that's not ASCII so
it's not probably "good" for the english version.
OTOH using ' both as a "begin" and "end" symbol is a bit misleading.
`%s' may be used, but it's asymmetric on most fonts (` being slanted,
while ' is usually vertical).

Using ISO-8859-1 instead of ASCII gives the possibility to use `%s´
(and also using ‘%s’ gets automagically converted to `%s´ by iconv on
terminals that do not support it AFAIK).

BTW: right now source code is assumed to be written in strict ASCII,
is that so? (I see no "--from-code" parameter to xgettext, so he
assumes it is ASCII); if we want to use non-ASCII chars in the source
itself we would need to both modify po/Makefile to add --from-code and
assure that each developer uses an editor that is capable of editing
that charset. I guess most european and US developers use either
ISO-8859-1 or CP1252 by default. Or we can simply go on and use the
a-bit-ugly-but-strictly-ASCII `%s' quoting, leaving to the .po files
the "role" to chose a nicer and "local" style of quotation (.po files
are managed by gettext/iconv and are chiefly edited using software
such as poEdit so have no problems in being in any charset, Unicode
included... often are UTF-8).

> ending in newlines is usually also a bug, and can be simply fixed.
> In particular, arguments to P/L/W/N/E will all have a newline
> appended automatically, and should not contain a literal trailing
> newline.

There are a looooot of ending newlines... I was wondering why there
weren't double newlines in the output, then I saw sanyty.cc:192-193
that it gets added only if it isn't already there. Then I guess I can
begin removing them without fear.

> I guess it isn't much harder to tidy up the English version than
> the Italian (maybe less, since once you've tidied up the English,
> you don't _have_ to tidy up the Italian :-)), but whatever works.

Well, simply opening a .po file with an editor is actually "easier"
than beginning to dig in the source code, i.e. discovering the meaning
of single-letter-functions and so on, but the latter is the best thing
to do, and with today I'm beginning to do it ;-)

  Lapo

- --
Lapo Luchini
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www.lapo.it (Jabber, ICQ, MSN)
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