View source for User:Ramzi Linden/I18N Specifications

=== Verbiage ===

# When writing a descriptor, or Help text, try to consider if your text has a subject + a verb.
#* hypothetical:
#** NOT SO GOOD: "Controls the angle that is reflected."
#** BETTER:  "Controls the angle that <font color="green">light</font> is reflected.
#** BETTER YET (for Help text):  "<font color="green">The Surface Reflection Power Tool</font> controls the angle that <font color="green">light</font> is reflected from the water."
# New UI text follows the Viewer Style Guide:
#* New UI text is highly localizable. The phrasing elimates geek-speak or robotic sentences in favor of conversational subject+verb sentences.
#* UI text does not depend on slang or idiom that does not translate easily.
# New Help text is also highly localizable in the same manner.

=== Text and Layout ===

# All new text strings should be extracted from a /skins/default/xui folder that contains XML files encoded as UTF-8.
#* New files use the existing standards of the Viewer's hierarchical-loaded localization architecture.
#* The Viewer should be capable to ship multiple locales for any parent language, such as es-ES vs. es-MX
# Startup error messages, such as driver faults or wrong command parameters, are also internationalized in a similar manner.
# When text needs to be assembled from multiple parts (concatenation), it is done so in a way that can accommodate alternate word order and specialized formatting of non-text information.
# All GUI layout is wide enough to accommodate the reasonable text expansion of a foreign language.  Generally, this means every widget can accommodate approximately 50% more space than is required by its English text, without the need for manual resizing. 
#* Whenever possible, window layouts put the widget below its label, instead of beside it. This allows a full line width for text expansion of the label.
#* Multi-line text widgets are programmed to word-wrap.
#* Programmatic word-wrap handles alternate international punctuation gracefully, such as a double-byte period 。, colon ：, 「quotation marks」, （parenthesis） , ？ , etc.
#* The buttons in Dialogs and Toasts resize dynamically to accommodate text expansion.  The largest button in a group of buttons may change in each locale.
#* It is important to abstract in your head the width of the ''widget'' from the width of the ''text string''.  Foreign languages often result in longer strings to say the same thing.
#* Whenever possible, plan on 1.5 * width of the string AS YOU SEE IT IN ENGLISH.  (A set of examples is in the image below.)
#* Flush-right the Help button (?).

:[[Image:i18n_widths.png]]