Re: pango and xplanet

[Arafat Medini <lumina at silverpen dot de>]

Hi

First of all about the pic itself. I remarked that, for representing the
Arabic region, you only used the cities of the Arabic east. This is not
really representative for the whole Arabic region which goes from Iraq
to marocco. Maybe you're only concentrating on one part of the globe,
but still it would be good to represent the Arabic region by one or two
more cities located on the other end...

Second, I think about it being a gimmick or not comes to it's adoption
by the user, if "many" Arabic users (for eg.) will use xplanet then it
would be nice to even have locales like Osaka in Arabic ;)
Else this is not really useful if only hackers and ppl of the western
hemisphere will use the file.

Third, the map is a little bit overcrowded, maybe you can use some
option to make the user display what he wants. cz I am seeing China and
Japan very full of city names but india without any city name ;) Well in
Japan I only see osaka, tokyo, nagoya and kamaukara (I suppose) but
corea is lost btw the kanjis...
So it would be better to have some representative cities instead of many
cities OR include all the cities (or the majority of them) with making
the ppl choose with a dialog for eg...

forth, what about some eyecandy like stars in the backgorund or a
crisper textures for the globe, or fading city names when the globe
rotates and the names get far away...

my 2 cents (euro cents ;)

yours
Arafat Medini
Am Fre, 2003-11-28 um 02.53 schrieb Tomohiro KUBOTA:
> 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/
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