[gnome-cy] Kartouche, CVS, keyboards, etc.

[Dafydd Harries <daf parnassus ath cx>]

Term ended on Friday so I've had a bit of spare time to do some
translation work, which I did using Kartouche. I've been working on the
basis that any translation is better than no translation at all, so
although some of the stuff I've submitted might not be very good, it
provides a starting point for improvements.

Here are some thoughts about Kartouche.  I'm assuming that the people
who these suggestions are most relevant to are watching this list.

First of all, on the whole, I like Kartouche a lot. It's very easy to go
to the website and find yourself suggesting translations before you know
what you're doing, and the whole thing is in general very usable. There
are a few things that bother me:

- Links are the same colour as other text. This is a big web design no-no.

- It would be nice to have column headings ("Original", "Current
  Translation", "Current Suggestion")

- It would be nice if the checkboxes could go away, which could be done
  by ignoring all results without non-whitespace (!/\S/) contents.
  Implementing this, and the previous suggestion, would make the
  interface immediately less confusing, I think, especially for people
  like me who start playing around without reading the documentation
  first.

- What is the Specific Item thing? It complained when I tried playing
  with it and I didn't see it documented anywhere.

- It would be nice to have a list of pages, possibly in the form of a row
  of links in the form:

  Jump to Messages: 1-20, 21-40, 41-60, 60-67

- It would be nice if your name is remembered. This doesn't have to be a
  cookie, it can just be passed in to the script as a default value for
  te text box.

- It would be nice if there was a working "show untranslated only" mode,
  with correct paging, so that it's very easy to start filling in gaps
  without having to wade through stuff that's already done. The page
  list would have to cooperate with this. (That is, each page should
  contain 20 untranslated messages, not just the untranslated messages
  with indexes within N to N + 20, if you see what I mean.)

- More statistics would be nice, both on the Start Translating and the
  Hall of Fame pages: specifically, number of strings translated,
  and number of suggestions pending approval.

I might have been more inclined to actually implement some of these myself,
but I'm afraid I harbour a strong dislike for PHP.

I found the Omnivore very helpful, and it would be even better if it was
fed translations made via Kartouche, since it would help consistency as
well as expanding the number of things it knows about. Maybe it should
even keep track of failed searches since they will probably indicate
where there are gaps. Oh, and also: can it not open in a new window? To
my mind, if people want a page in a new window they will take the
trouble of asking the browser for it explicitly, and people who want it
to open in a new tab have to ask for that explicitly anyway.

Again, I have to say that, on the whole, I am very pleased that Kartouche
exists and like it a lot. I'm also very happy that the KDE and Gnome
efforts are coordinating with each other, since this can only make our
respective projects easier and our results more consistent.

I'm a little fuzzy on the relationship between Kartouche and Gnome
CVS. Are the strings in Kartouche taken from HEAD? How are new
versions of messages handled? How do strings get from Kartouche into
CVS? It would be nice if CVS were not far behind Kartouche, since it
means that the GTP's statistics will be up-to-date.

It would be nice if we could start using intermediate results. I think
using a partial translation (with non-translated messages left in
English) would help give a feel for the status of the project and
indicate problems with existing translations sooner. What needs to be
done to make this happen? I run latest versions of Gnome, so I suppose
that I might be able to start using stuff we put in CVS if they get put
in newer releases. What do I need to do to tell Gnome to give me its
messages in Welsh? Is it just a matter of setting some environment
variables? And what about people who aren't necessarily running Gnome
versions that are so up-to-date? Is there an easy way for them to
install the translations and start using them?

A tangential thing: the name "Gyfieithu" bothers me a bit since it makes
me think "Camdreiglad!" when I hear it. (Or when I read it, for that
matter.) Besides the fact that the whole "it's a KDE thing so it'll
start with a K/it's a Gnome thing so it'll start with a G" thing annoys
me anyhow. But that's just me being pedantic.

Hmm. I came up with the following:

	xmodmap -e 'keycode 66 = Multi_key'

which works if I run it inside X, but not, it seems, from my
~/.xsession. It maps the CapsLock key to the X equivalent of Compose.
This might also work:

	xmodmap -e 'keysym CapsLock = Multi_key'

It mostly works in gnome-terminal, but not in Mozilla. I've
even got it to generate (but not display) w^ and y^ on occasion, which
are displayed correctly when I copy and paste them into Mozilla. At the
moment, it's not cooperating with w^ and y^. I don't understand the character
coding/locale/font/X/GTK/whatever interactions well enough to venture a
guess as to why I'm encountering the problems I am encountering.

Under Debian (I image the process is similar for other distributions),
you can set up a Compose key for the console by changing the line

	keycode 58 = CapsLock

to
	keycode 58 = Compose

in /etc/console/boottime.kmap.gz. It will get loaded automatically at
next boot, but you can make the change effective by running "loadkeys
/etc/console/boottime.kmap.gz", which I think needs to be done as root.
It seems to be more picky about order than X is: i.e. under X, typing
(Compose ' a) and (Compose a ') are equivalent, but Linux wants
(Compose ' a) and doing it the other way round will just print "a'".

-- 
Dafydd

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