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Triple dots instead of ellipsis
Status:
RESOLVED: INVALID
Product:
Mousepad
Component:
General

Comments

Description ema-pe 2018-06-24 18:31:59 CEST
There are some triple dots used as ellipsis in various strings. These strings are localizable, so in others languages translators can replace three dots with an ellipsis, fixing them. But they should be fixed also in the default language.

There are ten strings that contains triple dots instead of ellipsis: ../mousepad/main.c:84, ../mousepad/mousepad-encoding-dialog.c:172, ../mousepad/mousepad-window.c:405, ../mousepad/mousepad-window.c:410, ../mousepad/mousepad-window.c:413, ../mousepad/mousepad-window.c:451, ../mousepad/mousepad-window.c:452, ../mousepad/mousepad-window.c:455, ../mousepad/mousepad-window.c:2546, ../mousepad/mousepad-window.c:2557.
Comment 1 Andre Miranda editbugs 2018-06-24 20:03:08 CEST
Hi Emanuele, I saw your message in the i18n mailing list but I was not able to reply.

Indeed, translators are free to replace three dots with the ellipsis characters, I would say they are even encouraged to do so. However, I'm not sure the default language *should* use non-ascii characters. I understand that by now everybody should be using UTF-8 everywhere, still I wonder if there is a valid use case where this is not possible.
Actually I remember that some Russian users use KOI-8.

I'm not aware of any Xfce guideline that says we should use ascii-only characters or if we are free to use UTF-8.
In cases where Xfce documentation is not clear of missing, I usually refer to gtk/gnome's:
https://wiki.gnome.org/TranslationProject/DevGuidelines/Don%27t%20use%20anything%20besides%20ASCII%20or%20UTF-8%20in%20messages

Here is an example where Nautilus defaults to three dots:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/blob/4c237cff20965132710db2466834c9296fb4c125/po/en_GB.po#L7047

Under those circumstances, I think if it's possible to stick with ascii-only chars the better.
Comment 2 ema-pe 2018-06-25 11:01:26 CEST
> Actually I remember that some Russian users use KOI-8.

Yes, but they should use russian translation, in theory.

> Here is an example where Nautilus defaults to three dots:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/blob/4c237cff20965132710db2466834c9296fb4c125/po/en_GB.po#L7047

This is interesting. So they have a translation for the same language but with UTF-8 characters added to the latter. Is it possibile to have something like this also for Xfce?
Comment 3 Andre Miranda editbugs 2018-06-26 13:40:32 CEST
> This is interesting. So they have a translation for the same language but
> with UTF-8 characters added to the latter. Is it possibile to have something
> like this also for Xfce?
No, that's just the translation for en_GB.
Comment 4 Matthew Brush editbugs 2018-06-26 20:16:40 CEST
I have no opinion on this, but as I understand it, all strings in the GUI (labels, menu items, etc) in GTK+ are already in UTF-8.
Comment 5 ema-pe 2018-06-26 20:24:33 CEST
> No, that's just the translation for en_GB.

Now I undestand. But the problem is now on en_GB translation file[0].

[0]: https://git.xfce.org/apps/mousepad/tree/po/en_GB.po#n38
Comment 6 Matthew Brush editbugs 2018-06-28 18:27:41 CEST
> But the problem...

It's not really a problem, at least in English, an ellipsis is actually 3 periods in a row (sometimes separated by spaces), just as a double-quote is ", but could also be typeset as ” or a dash is - but could be typeset as – or —. That said, I don't really care either way. I personally always use three separate period characters because I have keys for them on my Canadian keyboard :)
Comment 7 Andre Miranda editbugs 2018-06-29 03:32:20 CEST
Me neither, I see no advantage in either way to describe ellipsis to justify the change.
Unless there's a valid reason, technical or visual, rather than just because there is a unicode character for that, I won't hunt down occurrences of "..." throughout Xfce's code, sorry.
Comment 8 ema-pe 2018-06-30 14:59:37 CEST
(In reply to Andre Miranda from comment #7)
> Me neither, I see no advantage in either way to describe ellipsis to justify
> the change.
> Unless there's a valid reason, technical or visual, rather than just because
> there is a unicode character for that, I won't hunt down occurrences of
> "..." throughout Xfce's code, sorry.

Ok, it is not a problem. Anyway ellipsis should be inserted on "en_GB.po" file or others english translation files. I'm not responibile for that translations, I'll try to notify them on the mailing list.

Bug #14473

Reported by:
ema-pe
Reported on: 2018-06-24
Last modified on: 2018-06-30

People

Assignee:
Matthew Brush
CC List:
3 users

Version

Version:
Unspecified
Target Milestone:
Mousepad 0.4.x

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