[haiku-development] Re: Key roles vs. key label in menus

  • From: John Scipione <jscipione@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2012 14:22:42 -0400

On Sat, Apr 7, 2012 at 1:40 PM, Rimas Kudelis <rq@xxxxxx> wrote:

> 2012.04.07 20:35, Ryan Leavengood rašė:
>
>  Also after all the discussions about maybe needing to translate Ctrl
>> or Alt or whatever words we would use in the menus, the symbols are
>> becoming more appealing to me. We would just need a good way of
>> explaining them to new users.
>>
>
> I still don't understand why localization of key names is so undesired in
> Haiku though. If you think that Strg in a German locale would hurt
> usability badly, then why not let the user choose between localized and
> English key names, or even allow to enter them manually? IMO, "Strg" is
> expected in German locale, and that should be enough.


#1 Symbols are automatically localized with no extra work.
#2 While Strg would work for German, it is difficult to find universal
translations for abbreviations of Option and Command for all languages.
#3 Letters alone would not be as visually distinct as symbols and would
take more room. That is one of the reason we use bitmaps, they are more
compact than there equivalents written in fonts and also have the advantage
that they have the appearance of keyboard keys hinting at their purpose.

John Scipione

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