Review Request: Add button to allow changing iconText() in KEditToolBar

[Christoph Feck]

Am Sunday 09 August 2009 20:43:49 schrieb Olivier Goffart:
> I guess this is because this patch is easier to do than fixing every
> application to have a proper iconText.
>
> But I'm rather in favor of fixing applications.

Yes, me too. But this is also a i18n problem.

Imaging an application that has an "Add Fonts" action in the toolbar and the 
menu.

	action->setText(i18n("Add Fonts..."));

The developer of that application sees no need to set a separate iconText, 
because the text is really short. When you translate that to german, you get 
the rather long text "Schriftarten hinzufügen...". Now the german translation 
team makes the developer aware of that problem and requests adding a 
setIconText() call in the application. This is what you get:

	action->setText(i18nc("Long text", "Add Fonts..."));
	action->setIconText(i18nc("Short text", "Add Fonts"));

This means that every translation team has to care about two texts now, even 
for languages where the texts could be the same.

The next issue is, how do you shorten "Schriftarten hinzufügen"? Some people 
do not like abbreviations or wrongly translated words. Personally I would 
use "Mehr Fonts", but I doubt that any translator would agree with 
that "translation".

I would highly appreciate a system that allows translators to only need to 
care about the issue if the shorter text is actually different, and that 
allows developers to not care at all (i.e. the above two-line-code is UGLY, 
the shorter text should be automatic after translation).

> (Note that in Qt 4.6 there is a new QAction property: the importance.  That
> can be changed to hide the text on the scrollbar completely if there is not
> enough space. http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2009/07/17/a-few-qtoolbar-
> improvements/)

Isn't any action in the toolbar important? How do you define importance? For 
me hiding the text makes only sense if the icon uniquely and clearly 
represents the action, otherwise the text might be needed to help the user 
understand what the icon does. And wether a user recognizes an action by an 
icon is probably a purely personal matter, and the decision should not be 
left to the developer. I am rather in favor of letting the user the decide 
which icons should have text, and which not (see bug 175123 "Select text only 
for wanted icons on toolbars to save space")

On a totally different note: please use the reviewboard to reply to comments, 
not everyone who wants to review is subscribed to this list.

Christoph Feck (kdepepo)

References:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=175123