[Freeciv-Dev] Re: City dialog too large

[Christian Knoke <ChrisK@xxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Feb 21, 2002 at 06:53:20PM +0100, Raimar Falke wrote:
> 
> In the german translation the new city dialog has a width of 754 while
> the english one has a width of 570. This has annoyed me for a long
> time. The attached patch shows the increase of the translation of
> strings which are used in the city dialog.

The problem is known, the reason not.

> 
> $ ./civclient | grep MARK | sort -n | tail
>  10 MARK 'Cities: %d total, %d over threshold of %d cities.
>  10 MARK 'Cities: %d total, %d over threshold of %d cities.
>  10 MARK 'Taxmen'
>  11 MARK 'Supported units'
>  13 MARK 'Auto attack vs'
>  13 MARK 'Next time open'
>  13 MARK 'see README.cma.'
>  14 MARK 'CMA and presets'
>  19 MARK 'Disband if build settler at size 1'
>  28 MARK 'Show future targets'
> 
> This means that the german translation of 'Show future targets' is 28
> chars longer than the original. 

But this doesn't harm, does it?

> It turns out that 'Disband if build
> settler at size 1' is the problem. If it is shortened the dialog will
> also get a width of 570. Since I noticed that the dialog is also
> bigger in the Dutch translation I attached the patch.

Your patch may help, but I think the problem is different IMVHO.
E.g. what can be achieved with the "Disband ..." string also could
be achieved if the right box in the Misc. page was smaller.

On the other hand, try to put a stealth bomber and Sun Tzu's in the
city's worklist. The german dialog will grow a lot, the english
won't (probably due to the "Future targets..." string).

So my wish to the coders would be to write flexible GUI's with
respect that translated strings can differ in length. That is
not easy, I know. - One great problem is the city report with
its button row.

But thank you for pointing this out.

Christian

-- 
Christian Knoke     * * *      http://www.enter.de/~c.knoke/
* * * * * * * * *  Ceterum censeo Microsoft esse dividendum.