Re: Word wrapping in PO

[Bruno Haible]

Hi,

Dwayne Bailey wrote:
> Although in most cases translators are not reading the PO format
> directly but are rather using a PO editor.  There are cases where a
> translator wants to work directly with the format.
> ...
> However, in a few cases the way that Gettext currently wraps words in
> the PO format makes it hard to read in the raw format.

You can always avoid this wrapping by preprocessing your PO file with
"msgcat --width=10000".

> The following
> diff snippet shows how a good wrapping was converted to a much harder to
> read form:
> 
> --- manager/chrome/pippki/pippki.dtd.po (revision 9338)
> +++ manager/chrome/pippki/pippki.dtd.po (working copy)
> @@ -95,9 +95,9 @@
>  "form data, personal certificates, and private keys will be forgotten.
> Are "
>  "you sure you want to reset your master password?"
>  msgstr ""
> -"Indien u u meesterwagwoord terugstel, sal al u gestoorde web- en "
> -"e-poswagwoorde, vormdata, persoonlike sertifikate en private sleutels
> "
> -"vergeet word. Is u seker dat u die meesterwagwoord wil teruglaai?"
> +"Indien u u meesterwagwoord terugstel, sal al u gestoorde web- en e-"
> +"poswagwoorde, vormdata, persoonlike sertifikate en private sleutels
> vergeet "
> +"word. Is u seker dat u die meesterwagwoord wil teruglaai?"
> 
>  #. Values for getpassword.xul
>  #: getPassword.title
> 
> This might not be clear with wrapping in my email.  In summary:
> 
> ...web- en "
> "e-poswagwoorde, ...
> 
> becomes
> 
> web en e-"
> "poswagwoorde...
> 
> The second is much harder to read.

I don't see how to do line breaking here that would avoid this special case,
without using a dictionary-based approach. I don't want a dictionary-based
line breaking in gettext since gettext has to support many languages, the
installed size of > 30 dictionaries would be huge, and the line breaking
feature in gettext is of minor usefulness anyway.

> Suggested solution: wrap only on spaces and do fancy word breaking only
> in cases where it is needed.

Sorry, this does not work for Chinese. The algorithm that gettext uses is
the Unicode line breaking algorithm [1], chosen because it produces
acceptable results in most scripts and most languages.

Bruno

[1] http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr14/