Help should fit in a 80 columns terminal

Alain Portal alain.portal at free.fr
Sat Jan 23 14:12:52 GMT 2010


Hi,

I saw that some help, provided by the --help option, could hold some very long 
strings making its difficult to read, particularly in some translation - french 
translation strings are often longer than english one.

As an example, you could see the output of "plasmoidviewer --help".

So, I think the output of the --help option should fit in a 80 columns 
terminal, with of course some flexibility.
As the option description starts at column 29, strings should be less than 51 
characters.
And to help translators, it could be added a context string like:
"TRANSLATORS: this is the description of a command line option. If your 
translation is longer than 50 characters, you are encouraged to add breaklines 
every time you need."
This context should be added for every option description, even if the english 
description is really short, and this could become a general development rule.

What do you think about this suggestion?

Regards,
Alain
-- 
Les pages de manuel Linux en français
http://manpagesfr.free.fr
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