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dear LSC members,
could you please keep me updated about the status of the following topics:
* approval of the ldraw spec 1.0.0
* internationalization and localization of the part library
* request for new offical meta command called INFO or HELP
many thx, w.
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In lugnet.cad.dev, Willy Tschager wrote:
> dear LSC members,
>
> could you please keep me updated about the status of the following topics:
>
> * approval of the ldraw spec 1.0.0
We have a motion on the table to approve this. It is in discussion now.
> * internationalization and localization of the part library
> * request for new offical meta command called INFO or HELP
I'll have to defer to Steve and Chris on these two.
>
> many thx, w.
Kevin
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In lugnet.cad.dev, Kevin L. Clague wrote:
> In lugnet.cad.dev, Willy Tschager wrote:
> > dear LSC members,
> >
> > could you please keep me updated about the status of the following topics:
> >
> > * approval of the ldraw spec 1.0.0
>
> We have a motion on the table to approve this. It is in discussion now.
>
> > * internationalization and localization of the part library
> > * request for new offical meta command called INFO or HELP
>
> I'll have to defer to Steve and Chris on these two.
>
> >
> > many thx, w.
>
> Kevin
Steve, Tore, Lars, Orion ... any?
w.
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In lugnet.cad.dev, Willy Tschager wrote:
> could you please keep me updated about the status of the following topics:
> * internationalization and localization of the part library
No work is being done on this at the moment. I think I may be expected to
submit an updated draft standard to the LSC on this topic. I will be quite busy
in January and February (change of country+job), so it may take some time before
I get around to fix the remaining issues in the current version of the draft.
Play well,
Jacob
--
LEGO furniture:
http://lego.jacob-sparre.dk/By/M%F8bler/
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In lugnet.cad.dev, Willy Tschager wrote:
> dear LSC members,
>
> could you please keep me updated about the status of the following topics:
>
> * approval of the ldraw spec 1.0.0
I have applied Robert's Rules in order to get this restarted. I will call for a
vote as soon as Orion is back from his trip to sea.
> * internationalization and localization of the part library
This topic has not been discussed. For me personally it is for lack of
interest. I have questions about this issue:
1. What problem are you hoping to solve with this effort?
2. Do you expect software developers to make changes to deal with this?
Speaking not as an LSC member, but as an individual software developer,
I have many things I would like to do that are much higher priority,
and would be much better investment of my time.
3. How will this improve the quality of life for all members of the LDraw
community?
4. I know that in my case as a member of the LSC, you have not heard any
feedback because I don't think it is worthy of consideration.
> * request for new offical meta command called INFO or HELP
Do you have reasons as to why you think it needs to be official? I'm
interested in justification. Anyone can unofficially add meta commands whenever
they want.
I tried to search but did not easily find the post where you proposed these
meta commands. Could you please give me a pointer?
Kevin
>
> many thx, w.
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In lugnet.cad.dev, Kevin L. Clague wrote:
> In lugnet.cad.dev, Willy Tschager wrote:
> > * internationalization and localization of the part library
>
> This topic has not been discussed. For me personally it is for lack of
> interest. I have questions about this issue:
I'm not Willy, but I think I can still provide a pretty good answer to all your
localization questions.
> 1. What problem are you hoping to solve with this effort?
Allow non-English speakers to be able to search for things in their own language
when using a modeling program (presumably MLCad). I don't see this being
particularly useful for a viewer like LDView or an instructions gen program like
LPub. But for MLCad, this could be a huge help.
> 2. Do you expect software developers to make changes to deal with this?
> Speaking not as an LSC member, but as an individual software developer,
> I have many things I would like to do that are much higher priority,
> and would be much better investment of my time.
It seems to me that the best way to implement this would be some kind of lookup
table that added localized part names and keywords, keyed off the part number.
This would then necessarily require either updates to software programs that
want to support this, or a tool that the user could run to convert their library
in place on their hard drive.
A tool to update the library on their hard drive would preclude the use of
Unicode, which is a definite minus. On the other hand, any LDraw-aware program
that shows part names and keywords would automatically have a translated library
to deal with, thus seriously decreasing the amount of time needed to have
wide-spread support. Either way, having foreign-language distributions of the
parts library seems like a really bad idea to me.
> 3. How will this improve the quality of life for all members of the LDraw
> community?
It won't improve things at all for native English speakers. However, it will
vastly improve things for all the people in the world who either don't speak
English or aren't fluent in (Australian/British) English.
> 4. I know that in my case as a member of the LSC, you have not heard any
> feedback because I don't think it is worthy of consideration.
It could be that the fact that I spent the time putting the mechanism in place
to allow people to provide translation modules for LDView makes me biased, but
it seems to me that this is a pretty big deal. While it's true a huge number of
people in this world speak English, it's also true that a huge number don't.
MLCad in particular already supports tranlation DLLs, but they cannot support
tranlating the part library right now.
Having said all that, it would be fairly straightforward for someone to make a
tool that created a file that contained all the parts with number, name, and
keywords (just like makelist, but with keywords added). Someone could then go
through and translate the file. Another program could take this file as input
and then update an LDraw library in place. And while this could be done without
any support from the ldraw.org or the LSC, it seems to me that an official
localization policy would be preferable.
--Travis
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In lugnet.cad.dev, Travis Cobbs wrote:
> Having said all that, it would be fairly straightforward for someone to make a
> tool that created a file that contained all the parts with number, name, and
> keywords (just like makelist, but with keywords added).
LDList creates a file similar to what you describe, called ldrawlist.txt. I'm
not sure how well the format would work for translations...
Alternately, how about something more like this?
http://www.ldraw.org/cgi-bin/tracker/translation.cgi
(it only does a few parts right now)
> Someone could then go
> through and translate the file. Another program could take this file as input
> and then update an LDraw library in place. And while this could be done without
> any support from the ldraw.org or the LSC, it seems to me that an official
> localization policy would be preferable.
Very true.
Steve
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In lugnet.cad.dev, Kevin L. Clague wrote:
> In lugnet.cad.dev, Willy Tschager wrote:
>
> > * internationalization and localization of the part library
>
> This topic has not been discussed. For me personally it is for lack of
> interest. I have questions about this issue:
>
> 1. What problem are you hoping to solve with this effort?
> 2. Do you expect software developers to make changes to deal with this?
> Speaking not as an LSC member, but as an individual software developer,
> I have many things I would like to do that are much higher priority,
> and would be much better investment of my time.
> 3. How will this improve the quality of life for all members of the LDraw
> community?
> 4. I know that in my case as a member of the LSC, you have not heard any
> feedback because I don't think it is worthy of consideration.
the aim is to lower the bar for newbies and people who don't speak any english.
assuming that you are not fluent in italian or german, just try to match the
following words with their german and italian counterparts:
brick
plate
tile
slope
piastrella
piastra
mattoncino
tegola
platte
stein
dachstein
fliese
and try to imagine what people have to face in MLCad. sometimes I still find
myself thinking hard for names or possible descriptions for parts I rarely use.
the thumbnails are a big help but it is quite annoying flicking through the
entire library in search for a specific part. a library in people's mothertongue
would speed things up enormously.
> > * request for new offical meta command called INFO or HELP
>
> Do you have reasons as to why you think it needs to be official? I'm
> interested in justification. Anyone can unofficially add meta commands whenever
> they want.
not being a programmer it is my way to add a meta command for a part I created.
http://www.ldraw.org/cgi-bin/ptdetail.cgi?f=parts/30114c01.dat
I'd like to see this feature in a prog in the near/far future and I'd like my
part to support this. as you might know sometimes it takes a long time to push
a part through the PT (right now there is still a part to be certified I created
in 2002) I'm not in the mood to add a meta-command to the part after it gets
supported by a prog, submit it for a single line and cancel all the votes it may
has collected.
> I tried to search but did not easily find the post where you proposed these
> meta commands. Could you please give me a pointer?
http://five.pairlist.net/pipermail/lsc/2005-April/000342.html
hope this helps understanding,
w.
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In lugnet.cad.dev, Willy Tschager wrote:
> In lugnet.cad.dev, Kevin L. Clague wrote:
> > In lugnet.cad.dev, Willy Tschager wrote:
>
> I'm not in the mood to add a meta-command to the part after it gets
> supported by a prog, submit it for a single line and cancel all the votes it > may has collected.
>
>
> w.
Actually, I don't have a problem with changing part header information with an
admin edit without destroying the existing votes, and have done this many times.
I would draw the line at changing data which affects the integrity of the part -
such as swicthing the BFC CERTIFY winding.
I believe this stance is consistent with not accepting HOLD votes for perceived
problems in the header - the review should be of the CAD representation of the
real part, not the metadata.
On the subject of internationalisation, I'd rather see the translations managed
separately from the part files. This makes sense from an ownership perspective -
someone with good English/Swedish skills could manage the Swedish translation
table, but we can't expect the Library Admins to have full understanding of
_all_ potential foreign languages. Whichever technique we use, it has an impact
on the applications that use the library, just different impacts.
Chris
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In lugnet.cad.dev, Chris Dee wrote:
> In lugnet.cad.dev, Willy Tschager wrote:
> > In lugnet.cad.dev, Kevin L. Clague wrote:
> > > In lugnet.cad.dev, Willy Tschager wrote:
> >
> > I'm not in the mood to add a meta-command to the part after it gets
> > supported by a prog, submit it for a single line and cancel all the votes it > may has collected.
> >
> >
> > w.
>
> Actually, I don't have a problem with changing part header information with an
> admin edit without destroying the existing votes, and have done this many times.
> I would draw the line at changing data which affects the integrity of the part -
> such as swicthing the BFC CERTIFY winding.
>
> I believe this stance is consistent with not accepting HOLD votes for perceived
> problems in the header - the review should be of the CAD representation of the
> real part, not the metadata.
>
> On the subject of internationalisation, I'd rather see the translations managed
> separately from the part files. This makes sense from an ownership perspective -
> someone with good English/Swedish skills could manage the Swedish translation
> table, but we can't expect the Library Admins to have full understanding of
> _all_ potential foreign languages. Whichever technique we use, it has an impact
> on the applications that use the library, just different impacts.
>
> Chris
Could the translation not be managed at the user end? For example we could make
a program "partstranslate" which reads in one or more translation table(s) (just
Swedish in this case) and goes through all parts adding a new line something
like what follows
0 KEYWORDS (SWEDISH) transa, transb, transc
with translations of every keyword it can translate. This would mean that a
Swedish owner could then run this program whenever he or she updates their
library.
If this has legal implications, the keywords could be added to another file with
a list of parts and their translated keywords.
A part author could, of course, add their own international keywords.
I could easily be missing something obvious here but perhaps this could be a
first stage solution with an automated version of it running on the ldraw
servers for newer parts.
Tim
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Willy Tschager wrote:
> sometimes I still find myself thinking hard for names or possible
> descriptions for parts I rarely use
That's where LDList (my LDRAW Part search program) comes in - you can even
search on the number of studs :-)
http://web.telia.com/~u16122508/ldlist.htm#ldlist
--
Anders Isaksson, Sweden
BlockCAD: http://web.telia.com/~u16122508/proglego.htm
Gallery: http://web.telia.com/~u16122508/gallery/index.htm
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In lugnet.cad.dev, Anders Isaksson wrote:
> Willy Tschager wrote:
> > sometimes I still find myself thinking hard for names or possible
> > descriptions for parts I rarely use
>
> That's where LDList (my LDRAW Part search program) comes in - you can even
> search on the number of studs :-)
>
> http://web.telia.com/~u16122508/ldlist.htm#ldlist
I can't, because I've never gotten that feature to work on my PC. :(
/Tore
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Do you have the latest version? 'Search by stud count' wasn't there until
4.0 (I think). Check the version in the caption bar (top of the window). Get
4.1 from:
http://web.telia.com/~u16122953/ldlist.zip
After installing, you must also do a 'Scan' again, to rebuild the index.
--
Anders Isaksson, Sweden
BlockCAD: http://web.telia.com/~u16122508/proglego.htm
Gallery: http://web.telia.com/~u16122508/gallery/index.htm
"Tore Eriksson" <tore.eriksson@mbox325.swipnet.se> skrev i meddelandet
news:IzFGqr.1oCr@lugnet.com...
> In lugnet.cad.dev, Anders Isaksson wrote:
> > Willy Tschager wrote:
> > > sometimes I still find myself thinking hard for names or possible
> > > descriptions for parts I rarely use
> >
> > That's where LDList (my LDRAW Part search program) comes in - you can
> > even
> > search on the number of studs :-)
> >
> > http://web.telia.com/~u16122508/ldlist.htm#ldlist
>
> I can't, because I've never gotten that feature to work on my PC. :(
>
> /Tore
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In lugnet.cad.dev, Anders Isaksson wrote:
> Do you have the latest version? 'Search by stud count' wasn't there until
> 4.0 (I think). Check the version in the caption bar (top of the window). Get
> 4.1 from:
>
> http://web.telia.com/~u16122953/ldlist.zip
>
> After installing, you must also do a 'Scan' again, to rebuild the index.
Yes, and now I know what the problem was: the scan takes 56 minutes on my
computer, with no sign of life from LDList, so I assumed that LDList must have
had crashed. But of course, it takes some time to count the studs from some 5
000 files.
Now that I let the scan be completed, it works great!
/Tore
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Tore Eriksson schrieb:
> In lugnet.cad.dev, Anders Isaksson wrote:
>
> > Do you have the latest version? 'Search by stud count' wasn't there until
> > 4.0 (I think). Check the version in the caption bar (top of the window). Get
> > 4.1 from:
> >
> > http://web.telia.com/~u16122953/ldlist.zip
> >
> > After installing, you must also do a 'Scan' again, to rebuild the index.
>
>
> Yes, and now I know what the problem was: the scan takes 56 minutes on my
> computer, with no sign of life from LDList, so I assumed that LDList must have
> had crashed. But of course, it takes some time to count the studs from some 5
> 000 files.
>
> Now that I let the scan be completed, it works great!
>
>
> /Tore
Is it possible to include a separate directory where the unofficial
files are?
cu
MikeHeide
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