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List:       kde-i18n-doc
Subject:    Re: KHelpcenter heading
From:       "Thomas Diehl" <thd () kde ! org>
Date:       2001-07-24 6:56:27
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On Mon, 23 Jul 2001 13:00:03 -0700, Waldo Bastian wrote:

>Can't you just include a large PNG with the alphabet in the desired font and 
>copy the characters one by one to draw the desired word?

I presume "you" would be the translation teams since the artists
probably don't know enough about the fonts and the meaning of the
strings.

>If you seperate all 
>characters with a single pixel line we could detect the width of the 
>individual characters automatically, although it wouldn't do kerning. Maybe 
>the string should be accompanied then with a second string that contains 
>hints for the inter-character spacing, that way it can be adjusted manually 
>as part of the translation.

Sounds way too complicated to me. Apart from the fact that translators
are usually not graphic professionals (and that rearranging the letters
would be real hard in the present layout with its thin background
lines): Everybody reading the translators mailing list knows how
difficult it is to get _any_ piece of information through to the 50+
language teams and how much time this usually takes. Just think of the
recent problems about plural handling. We had about a dozen threads
explaining the same stuff over and over, not mentioning all the private
mails behind the scenes on the same subject. And this was a vital
question for all of them. I don't think anybody would like to go to the
same or even bigger lengths just to preserve a certain layout for one
single text string. Certainly not me.

Therefore, I would really recommend looking for a text-only solution.
In the long run it should be possible to include drop shadow support
and other fancy CSS 2 (?) stuff into khtml which would hopefully enable
the artist team to find a satisfactory solution. Esp. if we could also
include the necessary fonts some time (don't know the licensing of the
GhostScript fonts Torsten mentioned in his posting, nor if they are
Unicode or how we could manage with the size of real Unicode fonts).

Question would be: What now? I agree that a text string without fancy
effects wouldn't look too good. But this is exactly what we have inside
the Helpcenter anyway. The headers of _all_ KDE documentation is just
like that -- text without any fancy formatting. The main heading would
just be consistent with that. Not great, but just like dozens of others
we already have and which nobody is going to turn into bitmaps either.

I'm not too enthusiastic about this myself. But weighing up the two
possibilities:

1)  make 50+ teams jump through a lot of loops (and finally just leave
it at the present state)
2)  or make a compromise now (and find a real satisfactory solution in
the long run)

... I'm certainly in favor of the second one.

>That might still cause problems for non-western language of course, but those 
>might be able to use an alternative PNG.
>
>This technique could then also be used for e.g. kde-edu where we probably 
>need fancy large fonts for educational/entertainment purposes as well.

Let's talk about this one as soon as everybody knows what it is about.

Regards,

Thomas



--- 
KDE translation: http://i18n.kde.org/
Deutsche KDE-Uebersetzung: http://i18n.kde.org/teams/de/

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