[Kde-accessibility] Quotation marks in german translation

[Gerrit Sangel]

Even though it seems to get a bit offtopic... ;)

Am Mittwoch 13 Februar 2008 schrieb Luciano Montanaro:

> Those characters are also in the iso-8859-1 and iso-8859-15 charsets, so
> they are not a problem, even with an 8 bit locale, they will work. The
> fancy quotes “„ are not, and may be a problem.
Well, but UTF-8 is also 8 bit (but, ok, it is a multibyte encoding, but most 
of the problems do not arise because of unicode, but because of the fonts).

>
> > 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 not a user issue, it's a distribution issue mainly, and maybe a
> font issue.
>
> And I don't know how many distributions are affected, or how many users
> are. So maybe everyone is on utf-8 by now, but I still have some doubt
> about it. Distributions I use have UTF 8 locales by default.

But isn’t KDE a difference anyway? Even if you configured the locale to 
iso-8859-1, I always thought that QT and KDE do support Unicode anyway? I 
once read that they use UTF-16 internally, so they don’t even use UTF-8.


> Ugh. That's not a very nice solution. I may want to use the character, but
> typeing it must be relativel mnemonic. I use an US layout with a compose
> key to type extended character, and I hoped there was some composition
> sequence I didn't know.

I don’t really use compose keys, except for some characters, so I don’t know 
about it. Even though, because I configured my keyboard layout, I don’t need 
to use compose keys for – or … or so.


> I know. I am quite fond of DejaVu myself. But can we rely on them being the
> default fonts? Actually, font substitution seem to work well, and the
> arrows seemed to show up for me with most fonts anyway. It would be nice to
> *know* if there are problems, however, instead of just hoping all would be
> well.

I have the problem on Gentoo that they seem to use Bitstream as default, and 
KDE3 or QT3 does not really support font substitution very well (but I guess 
this is different in KDE4). But as I said, imho they do need a gentle push. 
If they don’t think of it as necessary to change the default font to DejaVu, 
they won’t do it.
Even though, I think „“ were in the first version of Unicode or so, and I 
haven’t seen _any_ font without the proper glyphs for it. DejaVu Sans has all 
of them. It does not have ←↓→, though. 


> The problem is that we do not have control of the complete system, and we
> must be a bit conservative when it comes to these issues.
>
> I think we can have more leeway with the documentation, though -- it's
> converted to xhtml, and I think we can rely on utf-8 there.

But KDE is big enough to make some pressure ;)