Help should fit in a 80 columns terminal

[Pino Toscano]

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?

More than that, I guess it would make more sense using the UNIX terminal 
ioctl() API to get the size of the terminal, and adapt/reflow the help text of 
the options to it.

-- 
Pino Toscano
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 190 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-core-devel/attachments/20100123/649f8128/attachment.sig>