Fixes and changes to Lokalize, request for feedback

[Karl Ove Hufthammer]

Emir SARI skreiv 02.08.2024 12:57:
> I have a long list of feature requests that have been waiting in a text file, maybe it’s a good time to dump them here. Besides this, I am incredibly happy that Lokalize is getting some love, as it needs a lot of improvements in the text editing department.

A few comments on the suggestions:

> 1. Easier in-(HTML)-tag text editing. It is very tedious to find the text to edit inside of a huge block of HTML tags, and make sure that it correct.

Yes, HTML text is annoying. But I find that the colouring of the HTML 
tags very useful to distinguish markup from (often translatable) text.

You can also run ‘posieve check-tp-kde’ to test your files for markup 
errors. BTW, there used to be automatic check-tp-kde error reports sent 
to this mailing list. I don’t know why they stopped.


> 2. HTML preview. As most of you might relate, each time I see a huge block of HTML tags, I need to open a HTML previewer website to make sure I don’t mess up anything.

Yes, a HTML (and KUIT) preview feature would be nice.


> 3. Actually readable HTMl tag colour. That purple is unreadable, and outright irritating while translating documentation where there are a lot of predefined tags.

I actually find it very readable. But perhaps you’re using a dark theme? 
Anyway, it should be easy to fix (the colour it’s probably hardcoded 
instead of using colours from the user’s colour scheme). Can you file at 
bug at Bugzilla?


> 4. Fixed width font by default.

Hm, why? Most of the text we’re translating will *not* shown with a 
fixed-width font, so I’m not sure why a fixed-width font would be an 
advantage.


> 5. 80 column indicator line.

Again, why? The strings will typically be reformatted both by Lokalize 
when saving and by msgmerge when merging. (Though personally, I have set 
Lokalize to *not* reformat the strings when saving.)


> 6. Option to disable automatic completion. Never use it. Slows me a lot.

This has been implemented since February 2010, just a few months after 
the autocompletion feature was first implemented 
(https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=227399). I don’t use the feature 
(found it annoying) and have always had it disabled.


> 7. You need to actually close the glossary window in order to prompt a save. The window itself can be made more friendly.
> 8. Session restore is janky. Every once in a while all the panel layout gets messed up and you need to set an initial one then save it in order to restore it for new files.

Yes, I also experience this. The layout gets messed up and panes 
disappear (though they’re still listed as ‘enabled’ in the menu). It’s 
been this way for years. I haven’t filed a bug, as it’s hard to reliably 
reproduce.


> 9. Option to ignore HTML tags for text search. I don’t see how it is useful to search in HTML tags.

An option to ignore tags could be useful, but, personally, I sometimes 
find it useful to search for (if not *in* HTML tags).


> Below suggestions will help a lot with professional looking texts, a la Apple-level professional text. The new HIG also includes these:
> 10. Automatic smart single and double quotes
> 11. Automatic en, em dash formatting. Two for en, three for em.
> 12. Unicode character suggestions. If there is a ASCII ligature, offer to replace it with Unicode characters, for instance for arrows, ellipsis’, dashes etc.
> 13. Smart character suggestion. For instance offer to change 1 x 1 into multiplication sign, offer to change hyphen into minus sign when used with mathematical operations etc. Greater sign, less than sign etc. etc.

Also this should preferably be implemented as an autocorrect feature in 
KTextEditor (used by Kate, Kwrite, Lokalize etc.). But if implemented, 
it would be safer to keep it by disabled by default. Having " and ' 
turned into “” and ‘’ will break HTML markup.


> 14. macOS support. Improved Windows support. Windows support is very glitchy at the moment.
> 15. Invent integration to open files directly.
> 16. SVN integration to pull languages directly and set them up.

For item 15 and 16:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=399387


> 17. Settings panel has layout issues. Maybe port to QML?

I don’t really have any problems with the settings panel, but I find it 
annoying that some options are general options and some are 
project-specific options. At least the word-wrap and glossary options 
could be moved to the general settings (with a project-specific override 
option).


-- 
Karl Ove Hufthammer