Re: [Flightgear-devel] Suggestion of text changes in the launcher and menu

[James T. <ja...@fl...>]

> On 28 Jul 2021, at 15:58, PlayeRom <ro...@op...> wrote:
> 
> Hello. During working over translation for Polish language, I have some proposition for change some text in English too, which I can made. Please, let me know what you think.
> 
> 1. In the Launcher -> Settings page, there are two sentences with a link:
>     "See here for documentation on possible arguments." with "here" as a link
>     and
>     "click here to view the final set of arguments that will be used" with "click here" as a link.
>     The problem is that when you quickly take a look at the links, you see "here", so you still don't know what this means (what does this refer to), so you have to continue reading to be sure what you are clicking. So my proposition is change it to:
>     "See documentation for possible arguments." with "documentation" as a link, and
>     "see the final list of parameters that will be used." with "final list of parameters" as a link.
>     Then when you once read whole sentence then you don't have to read this again, enough look on the link, and you see highlighted "documentation" and "final list of parameters" - now you know quickly what you are clicking on.
> 
> 
> 
Yes agreed, let’s do that.

> 
> 2. Add space between number and unit, like "1000ft" should be "1000 ft". I found only two cases in the Launcher in weather scenario description. Maybe it's not that important, but FG is professional :)
> 
Strange: to me it’s correct that is no space between a value and its units. Maybe this varies by country? But at least for me in English it’s correct that we write units directly adjacent to the value. If there is a space, it would need to be a ’non-breaking’ space to avoid strange problems when text is line-wrapped. But I would prefer to standardise on no space, at least in English.

So, definitely don’t make this change :) Or figure out a way to do it for only some locales, if you feel strongly that it’s wrong in Polish.
> 
> 3. In sentence "A lovely day for trip to your favorite 100$ hamburger airfield" - shouldn't the $ sign be in front of the value? Like: "$100 hamburger"?
> 
It can be either, but anyway this string comes from the weather scenarios XML, not the launcher.

> 4. "Map (Canvas)" menu item change to "Topographic map" or "Map (Topographic)". The "Canvas" is good from developer point of view, because how I guess there is using the "canvas" object to draw the tiles with images of the maps. But to a non-dev user, this may sound strange and confusing. Some others suggestions?
> 
Topographic is kind of a technical word, not sure it would help more people, but let’s see if anyone else has an idea.
> 5. And probably the most invasive, add 3 dots notations for menu items which are opening a dialog. E.g. "View" -> "Select Airport..." (3-dots on the end, because it opening a dialog) but "View" -> "Random Attitude" (this execute the action immediately - so without 3-dots). With this it will be clean which menu item executing the action immediately, and which are safe to click. If that applies, the downside is that menus of aircrafts and addons remains without this convention and it will take some time before they start using it too, if ever.
> 
I think some aircraft menu merging might rely on the title, so this might not be such a great idea. Also, the in-sim menubar will change with the new GUI, *and* we use a native menubar on macOS. All these things mean the ’…’ is quite special: in particular it should be a particular Unicode glyph (i.e, not three period glyphs), but until I replace the PUI fonts we can’t use the correct Unicode symbol. So I would leave this change alone for now, but come back to it once the new GUI is merged.

> 
> And the question, if I will apply some of these changes for Launcher, this mean that all translations with changed sentences will be lost?
> 

The Qt lrelease / lupdate tools do some text fuzzing, so this should keep working correctly.

Kind regards,
James