kicad-doc-devs team mailing list archive

[Marco Ciampa <ciampix@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, May 28, 2019 at 02:27:01PM -0400, Jon Evans wrote:
> Is a good general approach here to use more tooltips for longer strings,
> and make strings that are part of the UI layout as small as possible?

Usually this is my preferred choice. Sometimes menu strings _can_ be
shortened because they usually depend on context. So the command "Add"
could mean different things in different context, it is easy to translate
and it is super short in most of the languages.

gettext has support for "context" strings but, unfortunately, wxwidgets
use just a subset of the gettext .po files capabilities 

See: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Contexts.html

Tooltips are grouped in the .po files together with the short form that
they relate to, so it is easy using a decent .po file editor to clarify
the context the short (usually menu) messages are referring to.

IMHO using tooltips for contextualize strings is a way to improve things
a bit even without the gettext context support.

PS: another way to improve life to translators is using comments.
Comments are usually extracted by gettext and attached to the
translatable strings as comments again. In this way translators know what
that specific message means or is referring to. I do not know what is the
level of support that wxwidgets has for gettext string comments though...

--


Marco Ciampa

I know a joke about UDP, but you might not get it.

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 GNU/Linux User #78271
 FSFE fellow #364

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