[haiku-development] Re: Key roles vs. key label in menus
- From: Oliver Tappe <zooey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 07 Apr 2012 23:34:03 +0200
On 2012-04-07 at 20:22:42 [+0200], John Scipione <jscipione@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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.
No they're not, the just stay the same. I believe, as a result of that, any
of these Symbols will work universally bad in all locales: their meaning has
to be looked up in some manual and then remembered, which is the worst
solution to the problem.
Using localized key roles or even key cap labels would be better, since
there's at least hope that are being recognised instantly.
> #2 While Strg would work for German, it is difficult to find universal
> translations for abbreviations of Option and Command for all languages.
There's nothing special about these terms, they can be localized just like
anything else, really.
> #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.
And those bitmaps could be localized, too (though the support for that isn't
yet implemented in the locale kit, IIRC).
Why you are trying so hard to avoid localization?
cheers,
Oliver
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