Re: UI language

Hi Matthew,

no matter, that the OS provides the setting for the language of
the OS, no application needs to read that property and automatically
set itself to that language. I wrote a lot of applications (have been
pro sw developer for over 20 years). Instead, it is good and more
professional
style to leave that choice to the users, as almost every application does
already during the install process.

However, I received three mails, all recommending to delete the *.mo
file(s),
which I will do now. It feels strange to delete a part of an app to get
such a simple setting fixed, and you will know that it would be no
interference
with the OS, or even loads of work to offer such a simple setting to pick
the language within the app or at least at installation time. All my apps
always were able to switch language at run time on the fly, and it was not
much work to realize that, not even when texts exceeded some 1,000 lines.

Anyway, thx for the hint with the mo files,

Martin (Dwalin)


> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] 
> Sent: Sunday, November 24, 2013 4:05 PM
> To: Bug reports, feature requests,etc.
> Subject: Re: [Fontforge-devel] UI language
> 
> On Sun, 24 Nov 2013, Dwalin wrote:
> > I am unhappy with the automatic language detection of 
> FontForge. I did not
> 
> It's a drastic thing to do, but you could probably just *delete* the
> installed FontForge.mo files for the translations you don't 
> want to use;
> then it should fall back on English.
> 
> Language selection is a feature of your operating system, not of
> FontForge.  There is no code in FontForge to automatically 
> "detect" the
> language; it just uses the setting that you chose in your operating
> system, much in the way that FontForge does not detect your 
> hard drive and
> video card, but uses the facilities of the operating system.  If the
> language you have chosen is not the one you want, you can 
> change it, but I
> don't think adding another layer of configuration to 
> FontForge to override
> the operating system would make things easier.  What would 
> happen would be
> that users would set their language in the usual way and then be upset
> when FontForge ignored it.  We've already got far too many ways (for
> instance, screen size, interface font, and widget set) in which
> FontForge's GUI overrides or ignores the system it runs on.  There are
> also some technical issues in that these settings are not so easy to
> override from within an application program (precisely 
> because application
> programs are not supposed to do that) but the technical 
> issues are less
> significant than the usability issue.
> 
> Depending on the OS, there may be a feature (of the OS, not a 
> feature of
> FontForge) to change the language on a per-application basis.  For
> instance, in most Linux desktop environments, you could edit 
> the settings
> for the menu item or icon that opens FontForge, to include appropriate
> environment variables to set a different locale.
> 
> The fact that some of the translations are bad or incomplete 
> is definitely
> a problem, and we're working on it, but it's separate from 
> the question of
> which one to use.  Keeping translations up to date is 
> difficult because it
> requires volunteers who can translate all the languages involved, on a
> long-term basis.
> -- 
> Matthew Skala
> [email protected]                 People before principles.
> http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/
> 
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