From kde-i18n-doc Tue Feb 24 22:41:33 2009 From: Frederik Schwarzer Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2009 22:41:33 +0000 To: kde-i18n-doc Subject: usage of &kappname; in documentation Message-Id: <200902242341.34291.schwarzerf () gmail ! com> X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-i18n-doc&m=123551535502590 Hi, for documentation writing there are some entities there to ease the writing and maintaining process. One of them is &kappname;. Until a few weeks ago, the documentation sanitizer on ebn[1] suggested to prefer the application's own entity (e.g. &dolphin;) over &kappname;. This bothered me for quite a long time now so I contacted Frerich Raabe, who runs the sanitizer. He told me, that ... oh whatever... stuff happened. In the end, Frerich, Philip, Burkhard and I decided to drop that rule. 1. http://l10n.kde.org/docs/markup/prologue.html suggests using &kappname; 2. We could not see any apparent downside Yesterday I changed some application entiries to &kappname; in kdegames and received feedback from Marek Laane, the Estonian translator. He said that using &kappname; makes translation for some languages more difficult. So I reverted the change for that moment. Since I have some difficulties following his argument, I want to ask a more broader audience (yes, you) about possible pitfalls. As far as the discussion between Frerich, Philip, Burkhard and me concerned, pros and cons are the following: pros: - reusability this comes in several flavours: - documentation snipplets that are used in multiple documents (e.g. describing the 'file save' action) - copying a doc and changing it for a new application (no, copy&paste is no crime in most parts of the world :) - translation memory in Lokalize - scriptability some translation teams work with scripts to reduce the workload cons: - readability If you read &dolphin;, you can tell easily what it will be substituted by (if not, it's "Dolphin" :)). &kappname; does not give a hint there. I think this con is what Marek meant, since there are different word endings for different application names/types/something. What I do not understand is, that kappname is used another 299 times in several applications[2]. Are those problematic as well? And the application entity is (as far as I can see) the same as the po file name. So, does the po file name not carry the same amount of information as the application entity? Ok, still awake? Good. :) If you can think of any drawbacks of replacing e.g. &dolphin; with &kappname; (still mentioned or not), please list them here so they can be discussed properly. Marek, this also goes to you if you think that I didn't get your point. Regards Disclaimer: Most of the information in this email are boldly taken from other people's emails. :) 1 http://www.englishbreakfastnetwork.org/sanitizer/?component=kde-4.x 2 ark, okteta, korn, konsolekalendar, kabcclient, ksirk, kollision, kpat, katomic, lskat, kspaceduel, kmahjongg, bovo, ksudoku, ksquares, kreversi, kbreakout, kolf, kshisen, ktron, kmousetool, kmouth, kmplayer, kwrite, knetworkconf, gwenview, visualdict, kuickshow, kate, kcachegrind