[Kde-accessibility] Quotation marks in german translation

[Gerrit Sangel]

Am Mittwoch 13 Februar 2008 schrieb Luciano Montanaro:

> More than accessibility, the problem could be that iso-8859-1 and
> iso-8859-15 charsets do not have those characters. This can be a problem if
> non utf-8 locales are still in use.

Well, I do not know how this is in Italian, but in German, äöüß is used, so it 
is not ascii compatible anyway. And everything nowadays supports UTF-8, and 
if not, it really should. I (personally) do not care if someone has some 
problems with unicode characters, just because he is too lazy to change. This 
is a bit different for accessibility, but eventually (if they do not do now) 
the accessibility applications should support full Unicode as well.

> I'd be interested in possible issues too, especially since we introduced
> the «» quotation marks in the Italian translations, and I hope these would
> not be a problem.
>
> I'd actually like to use the ellipses (but how do you type them?) and the
> n-dash when it makes typographical sense.

You can install scim (www.scim-im.org), which has a Unicode raw input input 
method. You can then just look in the unicode tables (they are all on 
www.unicode.org) and enter the hex unicode value, e.g. 2026 for …

A bit easier (and for everyday use) is to change your keyboard layout 
in /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols with e.g. U2026 for …  This is a bit 
inconvenient, because you cannot have _every_ unicode char on the keyboard, 
but for most characters, this should be sufficient.


example for my elippses key:

    key <AB09>  { [    period,      colon,                U2026,             
division ] };

Some characters have “normal” names, too, e.g. the en-dash:

    key <AB10>  { [     minus, underscore,               endash,               
emdash ] };


If you do not want to look in the unicode charts (even though they are mostly 
quite straightforward), Wikipedia has really good discussions about these 
characters. You can also just copy & paste them, but I find this a bit 
inconvenient. Changing the keyboard layout is the best way, imho.

>
> I also had a patch for the Italian .po files to use ←,→ in the menus
> instead of "Sinistra" and "Destra", which would directly map to key labels,
> but as well was not sure if it would break on system without the proper
> fonts.

Well, the DejaVu fonts are an extension of the Bitstream Vera fonts, and they 
are under the GPL. Most linux distributions use them as there default fonts 
(or the Bitstream fonts, but I do not know why the do not change this). I 
cannot think of any reason why they should not be used. And they have glyphs 
for _every_ of these characters.

I personally am a bit fed up that the overall development of the font display 
in the computing area is so slow, just because some people are too lazy to 
upgrade there system, without any real reason. Unicode is so old and still 
not everywhere supported, because the people still use iso-8859-1 or so. They 
do need a gentle push ;)

Gerrit