[Scummvm-devel] Including README translations

Simon Sawatzki SimSaw at gmx.de
Sat Jun 25 15:30:23 CEST 2011


Hi,

> The files work fine for me, and I don't need the 3 BOM bytes you
> mentioned to read them properly.

That's interesting. You get this simply right by double-clicking the file in the explorer or do you use "Open file" in Notepad and state that it should open as UTF-8?
   If you really get it opened correctly by just double-clicking, then that's interesting. How does it behave with ANSI files then? Are they displayed properly too? Does your Notepad version use some heuristic methods to find special characters (like German umlaute)? If so, what happens if you open a 3 MB text file (or even bigger) and there is only one such a character in the middle of the document?

> > Now I tested with the recent
> > development version created by buildbot and it doesn't work anymore, so
> the
> > change must have been quite recent.
> >
> >
> That's odd, was the version you mentioned the daily version? What error
> are
> you getting?

Yes, it was the daily build by buildbot from the mater branch. It said something in the error message about the kernel.

> Of course we want to support as many operating systems as
> possible,
> but the amount of work needed for a DOS version [...]

No, no, stop! :) I didn't mean that you should start working on a DOS port now. I only wanted to use it as an example to show my interest in supporting OS'es that are explained dead by marketing people.

> Fair enough, but you didn't specify that initially :) Sorry for the
> sarcasm,
> but you did imply that a lot of people are still using Windows 98, and
> that
> we should re-encode all of the translated README files just for this
> reason.
> And I said that supporting a long-dead OS does not justify that action.

Well, I didn't mean to imply that A LOT OF people do use these systems, but I did imply some few people still DO - for whatever reason. I don't want to get into deep political and ethic discussion now, but I'd like to say that most of the people on planet earth live in deep poverty. They may be depending on such an old OS once they afford to get an old computer. I simply think we should try having software that works for ALL people as long as it is possible and doesn't cause too much work.

My reasons for re-encode the readme translations to ANSI are simple: For me, ANSI and UTF-8 were on the same level as I wrote my previous emails. So for the cause of using it in Windows, both could be used in my opinion. Since the legacy Windowses have problems with UTF-8, I thought we could convert it to ANSI all the way. The readme translations don't contain any additional special letters. For example, if we were using Cyrillic and Polish letters in the German translation file, then I would have seen the need to use UTF-8. But no I see a slightly advantage: When opening the German readme on a Russian Windows for example, it will show wrong characters with ANSI but the right ones with UTF-8.
   Anyway, I did check the file behaviour under Windows ME and I saw that the big readme was opened automatically in Wordpad using the right encoding. But because our translations are just an excerpt of it, they will always open there in the small standard editor. So maybe a conversion should be done only for Win 95 etc. if those files are under the size for being opened with WordPad.

As for now, I think we should add the UTF-8 header by default for the "normal" (not-legacy) Windows version and deal with the older versions later.

>  I just said it does? UTF8 IS Unicode, btw.

Maybe we are talking about two different Unicodes there: When writing a file in Notepad and trying to save it, then you get to select the encoding. You can select there ANSI, UTF-8, Unicode, Unicode Big Endian. I guess the Unicode there means Unicode little Endian as I get there a text where each letter consists of two bytes. In UTF-8 to the contrary, only the "special letters" consist of two bytes if I remember correctly.

> But these people can happily use and read the English README. And as I
> mentioned, they can use a text editor that supports Unicode to read these
> files.
> So again, I do not see a reason to reencode our non-English documents for
> people using a dead OS, want to download ScummVM, do not want to download
> a text editor that supports Unicode and do want to read a README file that
> is not in English. If you can clearly demonstrate that such people exist,
> then by
> all means feel free to tell us otherwise.

As I said before: There may be special reasons why somebody still uses an old OS - be it for retro reasons, poverty or whatever. For poverty: I don't want to exclude people just because they live on the bottom of society. For me personally, that's against the moral of the original open source thought.

Regards
Simon

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