I learned a bit more, but progress is slow. Here are some observations: * I was able to "fix" the slightly broken ru.po file that we have and get the Russian translation to work. I didn't really know what I was doing; I just did "make ru.gmo" and made likely-looking changes in places where I was getting error messages and/or where the file header differed from the examples that work. I notice we have some other broken translations, so maybe those are fixable too. Maybe I should fix these and push a commit?
* Interestingly, the Russian translation is able to use the Microsoft TrueType core fonts for the web that I have installed on my Ubuntu 10.04 system (they come from the ttf-mscorefonts-installer package). For instance, the flags -messageFont "-*-arial-medium-r-normal--*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*" -clockFont "-*-arial-bold-r-normal--*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*" -coordFont "-*-arial-bold-r-normal--*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*" make that work, and the fonts look nice, though I didn't check all the board sizes to be sure everything fits right. This is much better than helvetica backed up by fixed. * For some reason that isn't clear to me, the Ukrainian translation is *not* able to use those fonts. They also cannot be used in the en_US.utf8 locale. In both cases, XCreateFontSet always returns an error after failing to find a font for *any* charset. I think I have tracked the failure down to the /usr/share/X11/locale/*/XLC_LOCALE file that gets chosen, but I don't know what the problem with it is yet. This highly cryptic file controls how XCreateFontSet chooses fonts for a locale. The ru_RU.utf8 locale has its own XLC_LOCALE file, while the uk_UA.utf8 locale doesn't have one and is configured to use the one for en_US.utf8 instead. (This is determined by /usr/share/X11/locale/locale.dir and locale.aliases. All of this stuff is part of X, not something we supply with xboard.) For some reason the en_US.utf8 XLC_LOCALE file has criteria that cause XCreateFontSet to reject all the Microsoft fonts, while the Russian one accepts them, or at least enough of them to get the job done. I don't know if there is any practical way for us to work around an issue in the XLC_LOCALE file, but if I finish tracking this down I can try reporting it upstream. On Sun, May 29, 2011 at 8:41 PM, Tim Mann <[email protected]> wrote: > I pushed a commit that uses "fixed" as a fallback font for missing > charsets. It's ugly in large sizes (particularly the clocks), but at least > it works. > > A nice (?) side effect of this commit is that "fixed" also will be used as > a fallback when the user doesn't have helvetica installed at all. Everyone > should have "fixed", as I understand it. The nice aspect is that the user > without helvetica doesn't get an error message and xboard functions. There > is also a not-nice aspect: the fixed font is ugly, so we may get complaints > (or users who are unhappy but don't complain) about xboard having ugly > fonts, when the real problem is just that they don't have helvetica > installed. > > > On Sun, May 29, 2011 at 6:06 PM, Tim Mann <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Basically this happens because the helvetica fonts that xboard uses by >> default don't have Cyrillic characters, at least not the versions of those >> fonts that you and I have on our machines. (I think we are both using some >> release of Ubuntu, right? I'm using 10.04.) >> >> I don't understand why we get wrong characters instead of the "missing >> character" glyph (which usually looks like a grayed-out open box), though. >> >> I am working to find a good way around this. At worst, I can tweak xboard >> to use the "fixed" font family for charsets that it can't find in helvetica. >> Unfortunately the fixed-width characters are a bit ugly. So far I haven't >> found any other fonts that work with xboard and display Cyrillic in xboard >> successfully, but I am confused about why some of the other fonts I have on >> my system don't work. I have a number of fonts that xfontsel understands >> (i.e., they are the X core font style of font, not the new fontconfig style >> that xboard can't use), and which xfontsel can use to display Cyrillic text, >> but XCreateFontSet fails and/or I still get incorrect characters with them. >> >> Sigh, none of this should be a problem in the GTK version of xboard since >> gtk uses fontconfig fonts. >> >> --Tim >> >> >> On Sun, May 29, 2011 at 12:10 AM, Arun Persaud <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>> Hi >>> >>> I just pushed the new Ukrainian translation we got from the TP. When >>> starting xboard (including your new commits) with >>> >>> LANG=uk_UA xboard >>> >>> I still get some garbage in the menu names though? I do get Umlaute and >>> other special characters for >>> >>> LANG=de_DE xboard >>> >>> Any idea where this comes from? >>> >>> ARUN >>> >> >> >
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