Re: Icon love

[Tuomas Kuosmanen <tigert ximian com>]

On Fri, 2002-01-18 at 10:47, Carlos Perelló Marín wrote:
> What will be really good is if you could do (or let us the source to do
> it) the l10n of text bold, text italic and text underline, for example,
> in spanish should be "N" (bold), "I" (italic) and "S" (underline)
>
> I suppose that we should modify the applications to be able to use a
> icon depending on our locale...
>

Please don't.

For once, I havent seen this on any other program. Also, B, I, U are rather clear since there is also the visual cue. It could be a lot harder, especially if a some language happens to map the stuff the other way around (word for "underline" would begin with "b" for example) - it would be very confusing.

I am worried this could lead to just over-engineering and it probably is not worth the effort. If something, we could use A, A, A then. (Depending on your mailer program, you might not see the example, but the idea was to use a bolded A, italic A and underlined A)

Same for sort icons. I have seen requests about this, which is sort of understandable, since for example finnish does not have Z as the last letter of the alphabet. But if we used the finnish localized version of the sort icon, it would have an arrow from A to Å. I think you see the point. A->Z is universally recognized as "beginning to end", although it is not exactly true on all languages. But the direction is right. Now a localized icon could be more literally correct but would totally hurt the usability by being less readable. Also, would be rather bad to have different icons depending what locale you happen to be using.

Just my worries.. :-) The idea of usability is to have easy to use applications, not linguistically correct ones ;-)

Tig

Tuomas Kuosmanen    Art Director    Ximian, Inc. tigert ximian com    www.ximian.com