On 2019-06-29 Mario Blättermann wrote:
> Let me summarize what I think about the next versions: Some new UI
> translations have arrived which would justify a bugfix release
> v5.2.5. All other things (re-wrapping the critical strings and man
> page translations) should wait until the master branch is ready
> for a new release (v5.4).

Thanks. I need to look at 5.2.5 soon. I plan to include only those new
translations that look good enough in sense of word wrapping and
alignments. Since there might be auto-word-wrapping in a later version,
I won't spend time discusing with translators to get the problems fixed
in v5.2 strings. I hope this plan isn't too rude.

About automatic word wrapping: I was about to commit a version but
noticed that gettext tools don't like what I did as I got a lot of
warnings like this:

    warning: internationalized messages should not contain the '\v'
    escape sequence

I repurposed the standard C control character escapes. It was slightly
simpler than using a separate escape character in the string, but
perhaps that was a stupid idea. Looking at gettext source, those
control chars seem to be fully supported along with octal escapes. It's
just that five standard escapes give a warning which cannot be
silenced. But perhaps po-editors don't like them or warn if a
translation contains a different number of those characters, I don't
know, but perhaps you or someone else know or can test.

I uploaded the patch here, it applies on top of xz.git master:

    
https://tukaani.org/temp/0001-xz-Add-automatic-word-wrapping-for-long-help.patch

The word wrapping is documented starting on line 118. The docs could
perhaps be better but I hope the idea is simple enough from
translators' point of view. If it's not, I don't know if word wrapping
is realistic as there has to be some sort of ultra-simple markup to
make it practical (the escape codes can be changed if really need).

I still haven't fully convinced myself that this kind of word wrapping
is a great idea but on the other hand it would be really nice if this
could solve the line length and alignment problems for good.

-- 
Lasse Collin  |  IRC: Larhzu @ IRCnet & Freenode

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