Asking the user for a text template
Rolf Eike Beer
kde at opensource.sf-tec.de
Thu May 6 18:13:52 BST 2010
Hi,
I'm just trying to get the last feature bits of KGpg for 4.5 polished. One
thing I did not pay any attention to is a text template the user should enter
if he sends an automated mail. The idea is that KGpg will sign a bunch of ids
at once and will send a mail out with the signed id using the text. Within the
text there should be some placeholders to make the text less static.
A very simple example could be:
== snip ==
Hi %IDNAME,
I'm sending you your key %KEYID.
Have fun with it.
%MYNAME
== snap ==
And then I would so some simple search and replace on those variables and
replace them with the texts for that particular id. This would basically be
what you can see with in the mail templates of KMail for example.
My questions are:
-is it a good idea to make the placeholder names itself translatable? So this
would be %MEINNAME instead of %MYNAME in German. In KMail those names are not
translated. I don't mind but for non-English people that looks a bit strange
and they may not even know what %QUOTE is.
-which is the widget of choice to use for that kind of thing? KTextEdit?
-where do I put the standard template? Just enter it into the widget? Put it
somewhere in the code and assign it? Put it as default string on the KConfig
option that will save the string at the end (probably best)?
-how do I deal best with translated placeholders? My initial idea would be to
say that they may only contain uppercase ASCII characters, everything else
would be used as delimiter. This makes dealing with translated placeholders
easier as in $StrangeLanguage MYNAME would be translated to NAMEFOO and IDNAME
to NAMEFOOBAR. But that doesn't look like a too clever idea as half of the
planet is not using ASCII as (part of) their native character set. What to do
then? Another idea would be to use %MYNAME% as the placeholder names.
-where do I document the restrictions to the placeholder names best for
translators, e.g. "no percent signs in placeholder names". In the context of
each replacement string? In a context to the editor widget? Somewhere
completely different?
Greetings,
Eike
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