mcs-manager dialog too wide

[Daichi Kawahata]

On Sat, 01 Apr 2006 11:54:12 -0800
Brian J. Tarricone wrote:

> > I've been updating some pt_BR translations for Xfce trunk
> > and I'm concerned about the width of the xfce-mcs-manager
> > dialog. It seems to me that every button is given the size
> > of the biggest one (which sounds consistent), but in pt_BR
> > it turns out that the whole dialog gets very wide (and ugly).

Yes I've noticed that too, it's defined by the most longest
strings among the translated strings, and in current Japanese
translation, it's far from 1:(1+√5)/2 as well
(xfce-mcs-manager.jpg).

> > So I decided to start wrapping the text for some of the plugin
> > labels and things started to look much better. The problem is
> > that the labels are not justified center (I think this is the
> > way it should look like), so I had to make a wild guess to
> > make sure it "looked" justified center:

As you've tried, I think a manually line-breaking may work if
that goes together with the centering, a GTK+ issue?

In my opinion, I don't prefer force-wrapping, because unlike
Latin/Germanic languages, there's no `white space' punctuation
in between words in some languages. Invalidly wrapped in a word
must be worse in appearance.

> You definitely should NOT be putting newlines in the translated
> text (actually, I think gettext will barf on this since the number
> of newlines in msgid and msgstr don't match). 

AFAIK, that happens only at leading/trailing new-line,

  `msgid' and `msgstr' entries do not both begin with '\n'
  `msgid' and `msgstr' entries do not both end with '\n'

therefore,

  msgid ""
  "This is a really long line to put into the button, we should wrap this string by all means"
  msgstr ""
  "This is a really long line\n"
  "to put into the button,\n"
  "we should wrap this string\n"
  "by all means"

is no problem at all, rather it's one of well-known workarounds.

Needless to say, the best solution must be letting the developer
know "Hey, isn't it a wee bit large to push into the rectangle?",
and that's the reason even original English is considered as
one of targets in i18n, I'd welcome joining of native English
speakers to xfce-i18n list.

Regards,
-- 
Daichi

Language Codes: http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/IG/ert/iso639.htm
Country Codes: http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/related/iso3166.txt
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: xfce-mcs-manager.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 53032 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://mail.xfce.org/pipermail/xfce4-dev/attachments/20060402/fc208603/attachment.jpg>