Subject:
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Re: LSC - current status?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.cad.dev
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Date:
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Tue, 16 May 2006 04:42:50 GMT
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Viewed:
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4294 times
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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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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: LSC - current status?
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| (...) 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? (URL) only does a few parts right now) (...) Very true. (...) (19 years ago, 16-May-06, to lugnet.cad.dev)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: LSC - current status?
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| (...) 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. (...) This topic has not been discussed. For me personally it is for lack of interest. I have questions about (...) (19 years ago, 16-May-06, to lugnet.cad.dev)
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