Re: [Freeciv-Dev] patch: registry improvements (PR#98)

[David Pfitzner <dwp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

David Perez Serrada <dperezs@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Thu, 12 Aug 1999, David Pfitzner wrote:

> > > wellcome= _("This is Freeciv "
> > >             "version 2.3 :-)")
> > 
> > Unfortunately this way it becomes painful to add multiline 
> > helptext to the ruleset file, since one would have to manually 
> > add double quotes to every line, and add explicit "\n" too 
> > if/where they are actually desired.
> But I think it is really better with double quotes ending strings, 
> suposse you want to mark a long text for translation:
> 
> hamlet="To be or not to be, that is the question wherever is noble
> for the mind to suffer...."
> 
> Then you are writting implicts end of lines in place where you
> don't want. Suppose that this text will go in a resizable text field, if
> the text field is narrow, then you would have things like that:
> 
>         /------------------------\
>         |To be or not to be, that|
>         |is the question wherever|
>         |is noble                |           <--- This line is awfull
>         |for the mind to suffer..|

But this is a problem/issue with the layout engine.  What I was 
planning was that the helptext system would strip out single newlines,
and do the line-wrapping itself (and convert double-newline to hard
line break and triple newline to paragraph break, so you can specify
those if you want them).

Or alternatively one could make the registry strip out the implicit
newlines; either way.  So for me this isn't really about newlines, 
its about having to double-quote every line.

> In the help file would be a lot of long text that will look really awfull.
> I think is better to mark explicit new lines and not implicit by the
> way the ruleset file was wrote. Of course it would be painfull to write
> all the double quotes (I think emacs have a mode to add this double quotes
> in po files).

Yeah, that what I don't like.  With the current helptext file 
the entries are quite free-form and easy to modify, except for
manually adjusting the line lengths.  It seems to me that moving
to a format which requires putting double quotes on every single
line to be a step backwards.  

Notice the helptext includes some quite long sections (eg, Settlers, 
Diplomats), and especially so if the full helptext file (not just
ruleset entries) is converted to registry format as I would like:
then you have big sections on combat, strategy (even the GPL, though
there are issues there for translations).  So I really prefer a more
free-form format.

Do you see any problem with having a script which extracts all
the marked strings in registry files and puts them in a form
suitable for gettext processing?

Regards,
-- David