On Thu, Dec 27, 2012 at 11:16 PM, Piotr Drąg <piotrdrag(a)gmail.com> wrote:
2012/12/27 Tommy He <lovenemesis(a)fedoraproject.org>:
> My dear fellows,
>
> Probably you're familiar with the famous phrase 'The quick brown fox
> jumps over the lazy dog'. As a pangram[1] it seems to be a standard
> typeface sample in any font viewer or configuration tool on any OS or
> DE. I'm fine with its popularity. What always confuses me is that it
> always remains the English form, never localized. I searched online,
> but the seemingly all-known Internet failed to provide an reasonable
> answer. Until recently I pick up the localization of fonts-tweak-tool,
> which is a new font configuration tool formally introduced in coming
> Fedora 18[2], this question haunted in my mind so hard that I have to
> ask here.
>
> Since the main purpose of pangram in font viewer is about the
> typefaces of characters, it wouldn't be much useful if literally
> translating 'quick brown fox' into another language. The ideal way I
> can think is to find a pangram native to the target language. For
> example, if I were using gnome-font-viewer to open a Chinese font(it
> seems that the metadata of a font can tell what language this font is
> intended for, but I'm not 100% sure), my concern is on how this font
> looks on Chinese characters. The 'quick brown fox' only showing 26
> alphabetical English characters just won't do. A Chinese pangram, if
> exists, will provide more in this case. However, in practice, there's
> a need to know how the 26 English alphabets look even in a non-English
> font. So displaying the English and the localized pangrams side by
> side would be more suitable.
>
> All right. To put it simple, do you think it would be more helpful if:
> a). for English font, display the "quick brown fox" pangram as sample.
> b). for non-English font, display the "quick brown fox" AND the
> pangram native to the language specified by the font metadata as
> samples.
>
> Obviously it requires both effort from developers and translators to
> make it happen. I'm not sure if there's any technical difficulty in
> fonts-tweak-tool thus CCed the main developer Akira. Also I'm writing
> to you the translators of Fedora Project to seek your opinions and
> expertise.
>
> PS: There are quite a number of pangrams in numerous languages listed
> on Wikipedia[3].
>
As a matter of fact GTK+/GNOME stack (in the Pango library [1]) has a
list of pangrams and a function to display it in user's native
language. I've seen it used e.g. in gnome-font-viewer and sushi. Is
fonts-tweak-tool based on GTK+? If so, it can easily use
pango_language_get_sample_string() API.
[1]
http://git.gnome.org/browse/pango/tree/pango/pango-language-sample-table.h
fonts-tweak-tool seems to base on PyGTK+. Hope it wouldn't be a issue
to utilize pango_language_get_sample_string() API.
Still, it's a question better to be answered by Akira :)
Thanks,
Tommy
--
Take a Deep Breath out of Windows
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Lovenemesis