Subject: POW -- which locales Just Work?
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Wed Feb 28 2001 - 18:58:39 CST
This weeks' project commemorates the recent addition of our 25th (!!)
localization of AbiWord, by asking the pesky question:
"Yeah, but do they all Just Work?"
As such, it's a perfect task for the army of folks who use the product in
something other than my native locale (en-US).
scope
-----
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to test AbiWord in one or
more of the following locales to figure out whether it Just Works, in *all*
of the following ways:
1. Without any manual configuration, AbiWord automatically recognizes and
honors your platform-specific locale settings. Among other things,
this would mean invoking the appropriate input method(s), if any.
2. If set, we should also honor any locale overrides in the system and user
preferences files.
3. On launch, the entire application user interface (menus, toolbars,
dialogs, and messages) is properly localized. None of the dialogs have
truncated labels.
4. You can type in the appropriate language. Without swearing. ;-)
5. Spell check Just Works too, provided you've installed an appropriate
dictionary.
6. You can print what you've typed in a WYSIWYG fashion. This may require
some twiddling with fonts.
7. You can cut & paste content to & from the clipboard.
8. The resulting document gets saved as Unicode, if necessary, rather than
in some platform-specific charset. This file can be opened and read
properly on a different platform. (For example, Russian documents
authored on Windows can be read on Linux, and vice versa.)
specific tasks
--------------
Unless some polyglot wants to test all 25 locales themselves, this task is
likely to require coordination among a large set of people. Thus, it might
be helpful for one such person to create a locale matrix (kind of like the
existing feature and UI matrices) to record the status of each tested locale
for the eight columns listed above:
auto, override, ui, typing, spell, wysiwyg, clipboard, & export
I'd be lying if I claimed that all eight columns would start out green for
most existing locales. (Indeed, there are days when I wonder about en-US.)
But that's not the point.
The whole goal of this POW is to create the locale matrix and get it filled
in, warts and all, so that we all know what still needs to be done to make
it totally green.
extra credit
------------
Of course, any help diagnosing the underlying problems would be greatly
appreciated. Patches would be even better. ;-)
For example, it's a lot easier to find someone to fix the hashtable-loading
code in ispell (ick) when we know that, say, 5 Latin-1 languages all fail
because they're each large instead of medium-format. (And yes, that's just a
guess.)
Have fun!
Paul
PS: For more background on the whole POW / ZAP / SHAZAM concept, see the
following introduction:
http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/99/September/0097.html
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