Re: lynx-dev Danish translation of lynx

[Klaus Weide]

On Sat, 6 May 2000, Byrial Jensen wrote:

> Hello Lynx developers
> 
> Morten Bo Johansen and I have begun to translate Lynx to Danish.
> 
> I have some questions and comments in that occasion.
> 
> 1) As far as I can see, there is at most 78 characters in the
> translatable lines. Is this a limit which may not be exceeded, or
> is there a limit at 79 or 80 characters?

Messages that appear on the statusline are usually cut off after
(cols - 2) characters, where cols is the screen or window width.  So if
you want to design your translations to work without truncation in an
80xNN terminal or window, you should ssume that only 78 columns are
available.

> 2) Some strings are even filled up with spaces to exactly 78
> characters, like this one:
> 
> #. #define FORM_NOVICELINE_ONE
> #: LYMessages.c:175
> msgid ""
> "            Enter text into the field by typing on the keyboard     "
> msgstr ""
> 
> I suppose that the translation must be exactly the same length. Is
> this correct?

Yes, that's a bit ugly; it may not be strictly necessary.  but it would be
safest to mimick that formatting in the translated string.

> 3) Are there other issues with regards to the length of
> translations that we must be aware of?

If a message sting is longer than the available width, it will be
truncated; it won't crash lynx, but the user obviously won't see
all the information.

Someone might want to design a message catalogue that assumes a
wider screen (say, 100 cols), but that shouldn't be the default.

   Klaus


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