Re: [Supertuxkart-devel] 0.5 release

[E. A. H. M. <coz...@gm...>]

Hi,

> 7) There are some menu issues, mainly with translations, e.g.
> http://forum.freegamedev.net/index.php?t=getfile&id=774&S=12359544a004f0e86d0c49105783046d

The link doesn't works for me, but I suppose is the thread in the
Contributions forum named 'Howto translate STK'. Properly named so I
didn't had to check each message one by one XD

>   I think the main problem is that the name of some tracks in some languages
>   (e.g.Italian) are too long, and therefore not fully visible. I think that
>   can be fixed by adding a \n in the translation. But the other problem
>   is that the menu widgets don't always have the same width (see
>   screenshot) - and this happens e.g. with the main menu as well (use nl_NL
>   to see this). Coz, is this easy to fix?

Well let's see. What do you mean by fixing? Text is always going to
increase the size of a widget it doesn't fits in. What I usually do is
to raise all widgets in a group by a certain percentage, for example,
I could commit now a bump in size from 40% to 60% for the problems in
the screenshot and solve them, until someone else writes inside a
widget and wants to stretch the size again.

A 'fix' could be that if you increase the size of one widget in a
group (for example, in a column), the rest of the widgets in a column
increase their size; I think this can be easily added. However, I'm
not sure this is the best way to handle this.

Another 'fix' could be just increasing widgets to their maximum
allowed space, but I'm not sure if it would take much time or be quick
to do this. It would definitely take more time than increasing the
size of all the widgets in a group.

If it were for me, I would give a reasonable size to each widget, and
expect that translators work with it; I don't know Italian, but maybe
there is a word that can replace 'Andata' and/or 'Ritorno' and is
shorter. Now, I'm not saying that it's not a good idea to increase the
size of the widgets in this specific case, since I do think that the
widgets are a bit short in length, and there is nothing to their sides
that would need the space, just giving an example. But it's a
disadvantage to have to resize the widgets everytime you want to
translate something, since it takes both a translator and a programmer
to do that, and I think that the languages offer much more options
than the space the widgets have. On the other hand, it might happen
that after the widgets reach a certain size, most translations will
fit easily and this might become a smaller issue in the future.

It would be good to see what someone who has experience translating
thinks about the last paragraph.

-Coz