--- Dom Lachowicz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Tuesday, September 10, 2002, at 09:44 PM, Andrew > Dunbar wrote:
<snip> > > There's another tiny issue related to this that > > came up on an i18n list recently. Sometimes icons > > are needed which are bidi dependent - so a good > > system will know to look for right-to-left icons > > in any right-to-left locale. Our current system > > is good but would need seperate icons for Hebrew, > > Yiddish, Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, etc. I have no idea > > if we yet have any icons which would be affected. > > I'm not sure if I understand this, or at least not > how it relates to bidi in particular as opposed to > i18n in general. UI toolkits suck as GTK+ and QT > have long supported substitutable icons based on > something like $LOCALE. Abi also supports this - > you'd hardly want an underlined 'U' to be used in > say, Russian, because the metaphor no longer fits; > you'd want a 'Y'. If you could clarify your intent > with regards to how this affects bidi in particular, > I for one would appreciate it, and probably be a bit > smarter because of it. Generally, high quality bidi-aware software does a complete mirror-image of the GUI. Both QT and GTK now support this. For instance, scrollbars will be on the left rather than the right but it should go a lot further than this according to RTL usability experts. Well that's the big picture which is a bit scary and we're probably not ready to dive into all of it. But one little aspect is localized icons. Just as your Russian example illustrates different scripts or alphabets, there are icons which will be wrong in right-to-left environments. The first one I can see is the icons for creating numbered and bulleted lists. In a left-to-right environment they look like this: 1----- 2----- 3----- o----- o----- o----- In a right-to-left environment they ought to look like this: -----1 -----2 -----3 -----o -----o -----o The increase/decrease indent icons are probably an even better example because they actually have little arrows pointing in the opposite direction that the text will move on an Arabic system. Okay now all of these little glitches can be fixed with our current system but care has to be taken to do the work for each individual language as it's needed. Our system is a little haphazard whereby we created icons with whatever name we like and reference them individually in i10n files. For example, the Russian bold icon is tb_text_bold_rus.xpm whereas the Spanish bold icon is tb_text_bold_N.xpm A slick approach would use a fallback system based on the locale with standard filenames: tb_text_bold_ru.xpm (Russian) tb_text_bold_es.xpm (Spanish) We can trivially extend this to regions: tb_text_bold_en_us.xpm (US English) tb_text_bold_en_gb.xpm (UK English) (I couldn't think of an actual example) And further to: tb_lists_bullets_ar_eg.xpm (Egyptian Arabic) tb_lists_bullets_ar.xpm (any Arabic) tb_lists_bullets_rtl.xpm (any right-to-left lang) tb_lists_bullets.xpm (any other lang) Anyway that's an ideal design for some day in the future. No need to drop everything and rush into it (: Andrew Dunbar. > Cheers, > Dom > ===== http://linguaphile.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/translator.pl http://www.abisource.com __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Everything you'll ever need on one web page from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts http://uk.my.yahoo.com
