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List:       kde-i18n-doc
Subject:    Re: German translation in Fraktur
From:       Federico Zenith <fzenith () broadpark ! no>
Date:       2008-02-06 5:38:58
Message-ID: 200802060639.03163.fzenith () broadpark ! no
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martedì 5 febbraio 2008, Gerrit Sangel ha scritto:
> Hello everyone,
>
> I had the idea to, well, resurrect ;) German Fraktur writing (German
> script) by making a "translation" of KDE into Fraktur. 
> [...]

Ok, to sum it up your problems are:
1) Use mandatory ligatures (OpenType);
2) Convert to old German spelling;
3) Switch font for acronyms and all-caps text in general.

In 1), you may want to substitute these ligatures diretly in the text with 
some regular expressions ("s/ch/whatever it is/g"), if they are included in 
Unicode. I could not find the ligature for "ch", though. Support of OpenType 
sounds more of an X11 issue to me.
Anyway, while programming an application, I noticed that a particular font (I 
think it was FreeSerif on Kubuntu) would show an "st" ligature, without me 
ever knowing it existed; so, ligatures that the font file provides for are 
probably supported out of the box already.

For 2) it would be very helpful to know whether it is possible to convert from 
new to old spelling with some rules ("All sequences of three consonants 
become two"), or whether it is on a case ­-by-case basis ("dass 
becomes "daß"). Anyway, if your only issue is with "ſs", you could just as 
well use the current spelling, substitute the appropriate "s" with "Å¿" and 
run a 'sed -e "s/ſs/ß/g" text.po' on the file: this would be way easier to 
do.

For 3), it looks like a problem that could be sent all the way upstream to the 
Qt libraries. The current HTML subset supported in rich text is this:
http://doc.trolltech.com/4.3/richtext-html-subset.html
I suppose you could use as a workaround "<span style="font-family: 
fantasy"></span>" or "<span style="font-family: cursive"></span>" to enclose 
text that cannot be rendered in Fraktur, and configure Antiqua for that kind 
of style. The text itself should be somewhat easy to find with a regexp, if 
the only cases are all-caps words. However, I do not think that every text on 
screen supports rich text. Not sure it can be made to either.

You may want to look to the Serbian team for advice, since they already 
maintain two parallel versions of their translations (latin and cyrillic, not 
sure which is the manual one and which is the machine-generated). You might 
generate a de@Latf locale, pretty much the way there is a sr@Latn locale.

> So, what do you think of it? After all, I think Fraktur writing is really a 
> beautiful writing, although some people think of it as negatively
> connotated, which is not the case.

Some people associate Fraktur with Nazi Germany, but in fact the Nazi regime 
abolished the use of Fraktur, calling it "Jewish script", and Hitler himself 
had a personal dislike for it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiqua-Fraktur_dispute

Cheers,
-Federico

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