Hi Danilo, On Fri, Sep 02, 2005 at 18:44:27 +0200, Danilo �?egan wrote:
> > As a side note: Opera folks address problem of having context info by > > adding > > extensive comments in their plaintext language file. This is comparatively > > recent practice but of help nonetheless. > > We've been doing that in Gnome for more than two years (probably a lot > longer), because GNU xgettext supports it when extracting translatable > messages from files. Also OOo string resources already may have comment info: the language "x-comment" is reserved for adding comments to string resource entries. However, in first place it has to be used by the developers who add/modify the resource strings, and second be supported by tools that extract the strings and/or convert them to .po or other translation systems. > The big question is: how much effort would be needed to port OOo to > use gettext? An even bigger question is: would gettext be able to handle it? How does it scale? Would it be worth the effort? If it still applies, the first obstacle that always came to my mind with any gettext implementation: the original string is in the source code. If that needs to be changed you need to recompile and link. _And_ you have to change the string in the corresponding gettext resource. In the past we already had quite some discussion about gettext and came to no conclusion where it was feasible to switch to gettext, did anything change in that system? Nowadays where tools like oo2po exist I wouldn't say that switching to a gettext based approach would be necessary from this view. However, there are some features of gettext that are worth taking a look at, like language dependant plurals, but much more important for lowering the barrier would it be to separate all localization effort from the source tree, and not having to run a build in the entire source tree just to (re)assemble some strings and bitmaps.. this _could_ be done using gettext, but for text only, and at what cost? People tend to only see the mere translation phase and simplicity of language packs regarding text only, and in these of course using gettext is much easier. For handling localized icons and such you'd still need another system, or did that change? And, at least years back when I took a look at it, gettext to me left an impression of a glued-together bunch of something working only under specific circumstances. This may have changed of course. Eike -- OOo/SO Calc core developer. Number formatter bedevilled I18N transpositionizer. GnuPG key 0x293C05FD: 997A 4C60 CE41 0149 0DB3 9E96 2F1A D073 293C 05FD --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
