Menu/Command capitalization

[Jaroslaw Staniek]

Hello,
Asking here as this is somewhat a cross platform issue. I do admit it
isn't a massive one but rather strange; I've never noted it before, I
just recently had to help with that for a customer's app.

Not too long ago MS Windows has moved from "Title Capitalization" to
"Sentence capitalization" for menus and commands:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn742392.aspx

What can we do and should we do something about this?

Questions and basic research follows:

- Of course for (most) FOSS people with pragmatic "good-enough"
approach such a small difference isn't a problem. Popular Windows FOSS
apps such as LibreOffice and GIMP ignore the guidelines. If this is
all you're interested in, you can stop reading already :)

- For everyone else perhaps it's better to offer something officially
or else some people would fork translations or avoid using KDE's code.

- Some (future?) KF5 users would target Windows expecting that the
resulting apps look and feel largely native.

- Is automated conversion for capitalization a reasonable approach?
Runtime or script-based generation.

- Maintaining the compliance "by hand" basically adds another variant
to each English variant of translation (US, UK,...)

- Are there other locales than English that use the Title
Capitalization? (it's good to know the scale)
  I've spotted this article
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_case#Title_case but did not find
non-english examples.

- Do we have checks for semantic strings and capitalization? If so
would they need updates, or?

- Not just Windows. Android and Windows Phone is similarly "affected"
in the discussed area.
  https://www.google.com/design/spec/style/writing.html#writing-capitalization-punctuation

- Mac OS X and iOS is consistent with KDE capitalization:
  https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/OSXHIGuidelines/TerminologyWording.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/20000957-CH15-SW4

- The most intrusive but ultimate solution: make our English
translations drop the Title Capitalization
-- Advantage: no special case for English anymore so no mistakes in
message strings (I've commited quite a few such fixes in my career,
have you?)
-- Disadvantage: we would start to be inconsistent with Mac OS X/iOS
guidelines, and I'd guess only with those :)

-- 
regards, Jaroslaw Staniek

KDE:
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Qt Certified Specialist:
: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jstaniek