[Marble-devel] Order of latitude and longitude in the UI

[Friedrich W. H. Kossebau]

Mardi, le 1 novembre 2011, à 11:43, vous avez écrit:
> Hi,
> 
> We had discussed this issue years ago (around 2006 IIRC). At that time the
> issue was a vi vs. emacs topic: There were schools which preferred LatLon
> (mostly in GPS circles) and others which preferred LonLat. Back at that
> time there didn't seem to be a clear preference (also Wikipedia articles
> at that time were sparse on geographical data compared to what is there
> today).
> 
> So we settled on Lon-Lat (which is also reflected in our Coding
> Guidelines):
> 
> https://projects.kde.org/projects/kde/kdeedu/marble/repository/revisions/ma
> ster/entry/CODING

Yes, saw that one before. But LatLonEdit made me ignore it rather ;)
Ideally LatLonEdit would be renamed, to not blur that internal order 
principle. Okay to do a patch for that?

> the only exception being namings which follow certain standards that get
> implemented (like KML).
> 
> Thinking about it I could even imagine that the preferred lon-lat/lat-lon
> order might be subject to i18n/l10n: Personally I rembember that early at
> school we were taught that the "correct" order would be "Länge, Breite".
> Then again looking into a Diercke World Atlas from 2009 (5th edition, the
> Diercke is a popular school atlas in Germany) I see a description: "Jeder
> Punkt auf der Erdoberfläche ist durch Angabe der Längen- und Breitengrade
> genau festgelegt. Beispiel: La Paz 16°30' Süd, 68°09' West."  (note the
> order of terms vs. actual example).

Hehe, I here guess the author is simply mixing things up (as I did for quite 
some time even when coding that LotLanParser for 
GeoDataCoordinates::fromString(...)).

WRT to i18n/l10n I had not come across a lonlat order, but my sampling was not 
too bug.
I just have seen that the reg expressions I did/overtake for the LotLanParser 
will fail for some non-western languages, e.g. as found in the Wikipedia pages 
about London:

Russian:    51°30′26″ с. ш. 0°07′39″ з. д.
Czech:      51°30´25´´ s. š. 0°07´37´´ z. d.
Japanese:   北緯51度30分28秒 西経0度07分41秒

(seems the actual center of London is also matter of i18n, perhaps it is the 
quarter of people coming from that cultures :P )

So will make the reg expressions strings subject to QObject::tr(...).
Is it okay to add some longer explanation into the disambiguation parameter, 
so translators know what to add there or who to ask? Might even put a link to 
a special Marble page on techbase.kde.org there, so that one can give more 
context or even have people put there some samples they found. Then these 
samples should also be available as testing data. Okay, so better have people 
send their sample data to e.g. this mailing list, and reference the webgit 
version of that samples file.

> On Monday, 31. October 2011 19:13:53 Friedrich W. H. Kossebau wrote:
> > Could that at least be made a configuration option, in which order to
> > render the coordinates or copy to clipboard? I would provide a patch for
> > this "bug"
> 
> The question is how to do this best (i.e. in a way that it doesn't
> introduce clutter).
> 
> We could add it to the Marble settings dialog under "View"->"Units".
> Currently we have an option there which allows to toggle the angle
> notation:
> 
> Angle: Degree (DMS) / Degree (Decimal)
> 
> Note that in the future we will have e.g. UTM added there which has no
> latitude vs. longitude (so if we add such an option it would probably get
> grayed out for the other cases).
> 
> 
> One possible way to do this would be to enhance the dialog with an example
> representation like this:
> 
> Angle: 				Degree (DMS)
>             				54° 48' N [ <-> ] 9°24' E
> 
> ... where the "[<->]" would be a button (with a double arrow) that allows
> to toggle the default order. This would hide the (not very important)
> order configuration inside a practical example that can also help the user
> to illustrate what DMS vs. Decimal means.
> 
> Of course it would also be possible to do it like this:
> 
> Angle: 				Degree (DMS)
> Coordinate Order: 	Latitude / Longitude
> 
> But for somebody who is not used to the geographical terms that might be a
> bit too abstract. So I'm currently leaning more to the example-based way
> to configure this. What do you think? Any other suggestions?

I would also favor the example-based way.
Also for the Angle notation in general, as I only knew the DMS one (without 
the name) before I started to scratch my items in Marble, "DMS or Radial?" 
would have put big question marks in my eyes.

Might have no time for a mockup/proposal for that until the hard feature 
freeze, so will not press to hard for this the following time. Still I would 
like to help on "fixing" that. Unless someone else beats me on this, surely 
welcome ;)

Cheers
Friedrich