Just wanted to note here some differences between Xiphos and BibleTime locale handling.
Setup: I'm working with a new, minority language translation. The language is Takwane with the language code abbreviation "tke". I have successfully created a module which has the conf file entry "Lang=tke" and began to note some oddities about locale handling. For ease of reading further, "Wambeela" is the Takwane name for Genesis and "1. Mose" is how the book name appears in our German locale. Xiphos: In Xiphos, when I start the application with my default locale of LANG=en_US.UTF-8 and open the Takwane module, the application properly understands only the English names of books and ignores the Takwane. That is, I can type in "Genesis 2:1" and be properly navigated to that position but entering "Wambeela 2:1" causes the application to ignore my input. To test, I started the application with LANG=de, and I could type EITHER "Genesis 2:1" or "1. Mose 2:1" and I would navigate to the appropriate passage. If I started the application with LANG=tke I could enter either "Genesis" or "Wambeela". Thus, Xiphos ignores the Lang setting on the module and only understands the LANG environment variable. BibleTime: In BibleTime I started the application with my en_US.UTF-8 locale and opened the Takwane module. Here, the module understood both "Genesis" and "Wambeela". Setting LANG=de and restarting the application causes it to still understand "Genesis" and "Wambeela" but it can't grasp "1. Mose" and instead punts me to "Rev 1:1" for a parsing error. Diatheke: Appears to ignore the LANG variable, but cannot parse the module's address without using the "-l tke" switch. So it appears that the engine will always comprehend English book names and that BibleTime is somehow honoring the module's Lang setting but ignoring its own UI setting while Xiphos is honoring the UI/environment setting but ignoring the module's Lang setting. I just wanted to put that out here, so there is a record of it and so developers for either app can think about the UX they want. In the case of Takwane, since neither application has a Takwane locale it is likely the users will try for Portugese in the application's UI but will still want to type their native Takwane book names. This makes Xiphos' UX undesirable as it only understands English and whatever locale the UI is in. But presumably a user might want to open a module in a different language and still be able to use their native locale (like us English speakers are probably used to doing since the engine appears to understand English all the time). This makes BibleTime's UX bad because it seems to ignore the UI's locale. I'm unsure of a path to take when recommending an application to the translators for testing because of this. Both situations could be awkward, unless they eventually decide it is worth the effort to translate the UI itself into Takwane. --Greg _______________________________________________ sword-devel mailing list: sword-devel@crosswire.org http://www.crosswire.org/mailman/listinfo/sword-devel Instructions to unsubscribe/change your settings at above page
