On Wed, May 07, 2008 at 01:33:30PM +0200, Jens Seidel wrote:
> > One request: Could we *please* get rid of these quoting characters
> > that, to my knowledge, can only be represented in UTF-8?
> > The German translation uses them (≪ and ≫) instead of single quotes,
> > even though all other translation use single quotes.
>
> You're wrong. »...« (not «...» as used in French) is properly supported
> by latin1 (iso-8859-1). The proper German quotes are indeed only usable
> in UTF-8 but even for 8bit output a transliteration to something similar
> as ,,...'' happens (I remember someone complaining about this
> transliteration) but it doesn't effect us. »...« are really a standard
> these days (at least for nearly all documents and programs in Debian).
>
> I'm not sure about Windows, thought, but it is compatible with
> Windows-1252.
Ah, OK. If they are in ISO-8859-1, I guess that's OK.
> '...' is just a big typographic mess and really not common for German
> translations.
Maybe it's a mess for novels, but we're not translating a novel.
We're translating the text of a tool that people might want to use on
an old vt100 terminal.
But there's no question that we need to use umlauts and other non-ASCII
characters that are necessary to display German words properly,
so we can assume people who want to use svn in German have
at least an ISO-8859-1 character set.
I won't stand in the way of any future translation maintainer who wants
to change the quotes to ' though.
> > I don't think it is wise to require UTF-8 for the output of
> > a comman line tool unless absolutely necessary, especially
> > since it might be used on terminals that do not understand UTF-8.
> > While the quotes as they currently are might look more pretty,
> > compatibility with older terminals should have a higher priority.
>
> Right. I haven't used any fancy UTF-8 characters yet but there exist
> special hyphens, non-breakable spaces, ... which could be useful :-)
Please let's resist the temptation :)
> > As Stefan Küng already suggested, please get a tigris.org account
> > and request commit access to the German translation. Until you
> > have that, I will gladly commit your patches (once we've sorted
> > out the quotes issue).
>
> Long time ago I obtained already a tigris.org account to be able to
> report a bug in Subversion or Subclipse. It's jensseidel.
OK. I will see if we can get you added as a committer for the
German translation.
Stefan
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Received on 2008-05-07 14:42:22 CEST