Hi Developers,
Due to a recent incident about localizations not fitting space
available, i.e.text length, e.g. on buttons, I wanted to beg all
developers and other spec writers to remember to check the length of the
longest text when setting button length. It used to be standard
procedure but may have gotten forgotten or is unknown to newer
developers. Sorry if you are just hearing about it for the first time!
Please see guidelines that include this and many other aspects for
anyone writing UI text (i.e. designing new dialogs, etc.).
http://specs.openoffice.org/collaterals/guides/text-style-guide.html
Quotation from the guidelines:
http://specs.openoffice.org/collaterals/guides/text-style-guide.html#Aware
Be Aware of Text Length
English text is much shorter than most of the localizations which
correspond to it. In fact, the localized text can be three times as
long. As a rule of thumb, check the Brazilian Portuguese translation (by
searching in LingTool) to see how many characters and spaces will have
to be visible on the button or in the space of the dialog. Sometimes,
however, Italian or French can present the longest translation. In
OpenOffice.org languages, Finnish seems to do a good job of competing
with Brazilian Portuguese for longest text. In the end, quality testing
of localized builds is the only way to find any imperfect UI text that
would call for a spatial adjustment in the design, so just do your best.
Until OpenOffice.org gets a layout manager which would automatically
adjust the space needed to accommodate the text in different languages,
the UI designer must leave enough room on the screen to allow space for
the longest translation. That is also why most of the text is positioned
above a control, such as a text box, or after a control, such as a check
box.
...........
By "check the [...] translation" I mean, to see the word or a similar
text where it is already used in the software (and therefore already
localized)
Instead of "LingTool" (the StarOffice localization database that I used
to use) I suggest looking at the localizations in the source code, or in
"pootle" (the tool known in the localization community)
Thanks for your support,
Liz
--
Sun Microsystems GmbH Elizabeth Matthis
Nagelsweg 55 User Experience Engineer
20097 Hamburg
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