RE: Pango Status Report, 4 Apr 2000

["Shahbaz Chaudhary" <chaudhar engin umich edu>]

Regarding widget mirroring:

>From what has been said about widget mirroring in this list so far, it seems
like there are three kinds of audiences.
1) Those who want to use an english GUI, but need the rtl only for inputing
data.
2) Those who learned (and are used to) english GUI, but would be more
comfortable in their own language and would like to see menus and dialog
boxes translated in their language.
3) Those who will want to use an rtl desktop.  These may be the people who
learn to use computers in their own language (never having deal with an
english desktop).  For them, it will indeed be odd to have the menu on the
left side of the window.

There are other possible issues, such as what if I want my desktop to show
urdu (or whatever) language menus and dialogs, but don't want the calendar
or default currency to change (perhaps for an immigrant in an english
speaking country).

Perhaps it would be better to make all these things configurable by the
user.  In other words, instead of either allowing type 1, 2, or 3, what if
we could make all these things properties that users could set.  So if I
wanted, I could choose to translate GUI to another language, leave the date
format alone (localization?), have the menu be rtl (mirrored), etc.

Shahbaz Chaudhary