Re: pango and xplanet

[Tomohiro KUBOTA <debian at tmail dot plala dot or dot jp>]

Hello,

From: nadim at arabeyes dot org (Nadim Shaikli)
Subject: Re: pango and xplanet
Date: Thu, 27 Nov 2003 13:05:20 -0800

> As for my opinion on having various cities
> written in their native language, that seems like a gimmick and not
> a very useful option - what good would something like that be to
> someone that doesn't speak Japanese or Russian (it'll look nice
> and cool, but be very unpractical) - I'd suggest having all in
> english as default and having localized .po files with all city
> names translated.

I agree that your idea is useful.  This is what I called "localization
mode" in my last mail.  For example, all languages will have translation
of "north pole" and "south pole".

However, the followings are my (minor) concerns:

1. The difference between translation and transliteration.
For example, someone can supply "cyrillic" ".po" file.  Is the
".po" file "ru.po", though the file would be useful for many
Cyrillic languages?

2. Marker file is supplied as a separate file and not hard-coded
in the xplanet binary.  This helps users to modify the marker
file.  However, gettext translation files are compiled to ".mo"
file (in executable form) and are not modifiable by users.
Thus adoptation of gettext will kill (a part of) the flexibility.

Anyway, these two concerns are very minor and I don't oppose
to adopt gettext.  The only one opinion of mine is that "global"
mode or "pango" marker file (write city names in native expressions
in their city) would look nice.  Since xplanet can be used as a
screen saver, "looks nice" is one of very important points.

BTW, the name of "pango" marker file is not very good when xplanet
will adopt gettext, because xplanet will need pango for "localization"
mode in some locales like Arab.

I can supply Japanese ".po" file when xplanet will adopt gettext.



From: Hari Nair <hari at alumni dot caltech dot edu>
Subject: Re: pango and xplanet
Date: Thu, 27 Nov 2003 14:21:07 -0800

> Hello all - I've put an image up at
> http://xplanet.sourceforge.net/pango/pango.png
> with the cities in the attached marker file.

Looks nice for China, Japan, Korea, and Russia.
However, positions of city names sometimes have problems.
I imagine this is because city density is too high.  Usage
of smaller font may solve the problem.  For example, there
are four Japanese cities (Tokyo, Yokohama, Nagoya, and Osaka).
Tokyo is located at the most eastern among them, but the
arrangement of the labels is not.  Anyway, the marker file
has no problem.

---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <kubota at debian dot org>
http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/