Re: Markup in messages

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad behdad org>]

> On 7/18/06, Christian Rose <menthos gnome org> wrote:
> > Behdad, this is about http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=347110
> > -- it was only recently that I discovered that you have included a
> > section about markup to http://live.gnome.org/GnomeI18nDeveloperTips :

Hi Chrisitan,

Actually Roozbeh added that.  I'm typically more relaxed as far as
future-proofing regulations goes :).

> > "Following is a list of examples that need to be marked for
> > translation, but were not in some cases:
> > [...]
> > '<b>%s</b>': That is an innocent way to mark something to make it
> > boldface in the interface, to emphasize importance or make it a
> > header. But not every language has a concept of modern boldface
> > typefaces, or even if it has such fonts, they may not be the preferred
> > font for such kind of emphasis."
> >
> > So are you suggesting that developers include the surrounding markup
> > in the translateable message, in case you may need to change it for
> > Persian for rendering purposes?

I'm almost sure there's no place in the Persian translations that we
make use of this.  And personally, I think your request is way to go.

> My guess is that they are just reluctant to changing anything
> not visually beneficial, not that they have already foreseen
> the problem. But to make an excuse, this is a good
> one, especially when what Behdad said is valid. I have been
> bitten by this kind of markup/font issues myself.
> 
> Due to absense of freely available boldface Chinese font, I
> have seen somebody translate things like:
> 
> msgid "<b>%s</b>"
> msgstr "<i>%s</i>"
> 
> in order to distinguish it from normal text.

This is the wrongest approach to solve this problem, and indeed what
Roozbeh has had in mind.  In the case of Chinese fonts with no bold
variant, there are a lot of possibilities on Linux.  First, with the
latest version of the text rendering stack, we should be emboldening for
you on the fly.  Second, if you want to replace bold with italic, you
can do that with a fontconfig configuration file.  There is a bug
against Pango to make artificial bold and italic faces even show in the
font selection widget.  That way, there's really no excuse to not use
bold faces (unless you are dealing with a bitmap font of course).

> Of course in most cases the proper 'fix' is to have a boldtype
> font. But creating a boldface font is not always that easy,
> when one is talking about complex scripts that consists of
> at least hundreds or thousands of glyphs; and it needs quite
> some human horsepower as well, which may not be available for
> newly available languages in F/OSS world.
> 
> Abel

-- 
behdad
http://behdad.org/

"Commandment Three says Do Not Kill, Amendment Two says Blood Will Spill"
        -- Dan Bern, "New American Language"