Almost all messages in up2date include hard-coded line breaks ("\n"). These are bad both for localization and accessibility. Below is the rationale: --- Avoid hard-coded line breaks whenever possible in text that is to be shown with variable width fonts, if you can use a toolkit that allows for automatic line wrapping, such as GTK+. In other words, don't do it like this: message = _("GFoo is an excellent frobnicator\n" "application that supports many\n" "different frobnicators. It was\n" "written by F. Foo and B. Bar\n" "with help from B. Baz."); Instead, use automatic line wrapping and make the message have no line breaks: message = _("GFoo is an excellent frobnicator " "application that supports many " "different frobnicators. It was " "written by F. Foo and B. Bar " "with help from B. Baz."); The reasons for this is that making the lines have the appropriate width with some variable-width font that is different from the one used when editing is not only a difficult task for the developer, it's also a very difficult task for all translators. Also, the danger of line breaks "moving around" when the developer changes the hard-coded wrapping (and thus all translations needing updates) is eliminated when line breaks are removed. Automatic line wrapping is also very useful for users that need accessibility and other users that want to use different fonts or bigger fonts. --- Please consider using automatic line wrapping where possible.
Okay, extraneous new lines cleaned up... at least some of them. This changes alot of strings though... in 3.1.10...
on second thought, maybe not... seems to break the heck out the current makefiles for generate po files... investigating what causing the breakage...
I'm attaching a list of messages (from the current pot file) that has hard-coded line breaks inside sentences.
Created attachment 89778 [details] List ofe messages with hard-coded line breaks inside sentences
An additional note is that many messages currently are identical between the GUI version and the TUI version, with the exception of the added hard-coded line breaks in the GUI versions of the messages. This means that there are two copies of almost all messages, one with the hard-coded line breaks and one without, and thus the work is doubled for all translators. If the GUI versions of the messages were standardized to not use hard-coded line breaks like the TUI versions, this would dramatically reduce the needed work from translators, since message translations can be re-used between the TUI and GUI versions. And if the TUI versions of the messages are already translated, there is no need to update at all.
Bouncing this back to assigned, as there appears to still be some issues related to line breaking and consolidating the TUI and GUI messaging.
Had another stab at this. Changes should lane on elvis soon.