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Mark de Wever schrieb:
> Now that we have pango support for dialogs we also have more options to do
> formatting. At the moment this formatting is used by the engine internally
> to convert the Wesnoth markup to pango markup. The question is do we want to
> allow the WML authors to use pango markup or not.

Like you already know, I would *really* prefer to have the markup more visible,
especially for translators.

> The pros and cons of both markup systems
> Pango [1]
> Pro:
> - Markup can be used everywhere in a text.
> - looks like html, which might be easier for authors of WML to reconized.
> Con:
> - Certain characters like & must be escaped like &
> 
> Wesnoth markup [2]
> Pro:
> - Simple to use.
> Con:
> - Markup can be used on a per line basis.

I think the cons for pango are rather seldom cases, right? And you missed to
list the main Con for Wesnoth markup:
 - easy to miss eg for translators

> If we want to give WML authors acces to the Pango syntax do we also want to
> keep the current WML syntax? (I see no way to automate the conversion
> easily, especially since I expect authors want to take advantage of the new
> way, so the text needs a manual review. So we'll need a, long, transition
> phase supporting both syntaxes if we want to phase it out.)

Yes, they will need manual review. But I think especially right at the start of
a new dev series we can do so. That is:
Go the easy way and completely drop the old syntax from ingame and just throw
some warning for the known signs of old syntax. That is if eg an '@' is found at
the start of the string, display a normal deprecated warning but do *not* format
the string accordingly. Since the list of special chars is rather limited this
should be possible to do.
This way we would be sure that there is no strange mix in things.

In regards to updating old code eg via wmllint: hmm, should be possible. What we
know is that some formating char at the start of the line means that the whole
line was meant to be eg in green. So wmllint could "just" replace the @ at the
start with a <green>old text without @ at the beginning</green>. IIRC wmllint
works basically linebased, this should allow such replacement since the markup
was only valid for the current line anyway.
But yes, an extra warning about those conversions being done should be thrown.

> Of course if we decide to do it we'll need to discuss how to implement it in
> WML and how to help the WML authors to properly escape their strings. But I
> rather put off those questions until we know what we want.

Hehe, here comes the more tricky part... Though most stuff *should* somehow be
possible once we got a working syntax. Eg stuff like detecting "free" & should
be possible in wmllint. But yes, the "special chars have to be converted" could
become strange. Would be nice to know what has to be converted, as in "will
normal utf8 letters work as expected or might they lead to problems, too?",
since this is a very relevant part when it comes to translations. As long as
"only" stuff like & and the likes are affected, there should not be too many
problems to convert things.

Cheers,
Nils Kneuper aka Ivanovic
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