Help should fit in a 80 columns terminal

[Albert Astals Cid]

A Dissabte, 23 de gener de 2010, Alain Portal va escriure:
> 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?

If we ever accept this policy it has to be about ALL --help texts, not only 
about translations.

Albert

> 
> Regards,
> Alain
>