[pmwiki-users] Internationalization issues

Oliver Betz list_ob at gmx.net
Fri Mar 2 14:04:39 CST 2007


"Patrick R. Michaud" wrote:

> > "Simply unpack the archive" (i18n.tgz) as suggested in 
> > "Internationalizations" is not what I consider suitable, there are
> > too many drawbacks.
> 
> I've been wanting to clean up the i18n.tgz files (and separate
> them into separate language distributions), but haven't had a lot of
> time to do that.

I will have a look at the German pages. Are the main contributors 
also reading here, or will I need to subscribe also the German 
mailing list?

[filenames contain 8 bit characters]

> > That's ugly, IMNSHO. On linux, "ls" shows only question marks,
> > midnight commander fails also. On Windows, it doesn't look better.
> > 7Zip and Powerarchiver didn't even extract the correct names -
> > Cygwin's tar did the job finally.
> 
> It depends on how well the various utilities and filesystems
> understand the character encoding that was used when the pages were
> created. On some Linux systems the characters look fine (ISO-8859-1)
> or not find (UTF-8).  On OS/X systems, only UTF-8 encodings are
> allowed in filenames.  Windows has its own set of restrictions.  

therefore I always tell people: don't use 8 bit characters 
(especially Umlauts in Germany), don't use spaces, use only A..Z, 
0..9 and underscore.

[which pages go to the i18n distribution]

> Whatever shows up in the per-language directories on pmwiki.org
> is what ends up in the distribution.  If pages don't belong, then
> someone (who understands the language) needs to fix that for me.

I'm afraid that there will be always some testing stuff, newbie 
errors, maybe also spam. Another advantage of using page text 
variables.

[...]

> > The German "StandDerÜbersetzung" page already has a flag for the
> > audience (user, admin, system administration), what about moving
> > this information to page text variables?
> 
> That's has some possibility, although some of the pages have
> different sections targeting different audiences.

There can be more than one flag in the page.

I still think that the translation pages should _contain_ information 
about their usage. This would make thinks safer and simpler than a 
separate list - that's very inconvenient to maintain.

Oliver
-- 
Oliver Betz, Muenchen




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