RFC: Translating Wine's dialogs with PO files

[Alexandre Julliard]

Francois Gouget <fgouget at free.fr> writes:

> This is the next step in making full use of the PO files for translating 
> Wine. But how to get there is unclear, hence this RFC.
>
> The issue with dialogs is that in RC files all the dialog and control 
> sizes are hardcoded. For instance in the line below '208, 6, 56, 14' 
> represent the x-left, y-top, width and height of the button:
>
>    DEFPUSHBUTTON "Save As", IDOK, 208, 6, 56, 14, BS_DEFPUSHBUTTON | WS_GROUP | WS_TABSTOP
>
> The problem is that once translated to French, for instance, the label 
> becomes 'Enregistrer sous' which is much longer and may require 
> enlarging the button. But RC files do not contain the information needed 
> to do that automatically. For instance they don't specify enlarging this 
> button requires enlarging the 'Cancel' and 'Help' buttons below too.
>
> So how do we solve this problem?

There's another option: design the dialogs with enough spare room that
most languages would fit, and maintain language-specific RC files for
the special cases that really can't be accommodated. Ideally, a tool
would be written to warn about a translation overflowing the available
space, so that it can be looked into. Not very satisfying, but a lot
simpler than the other options...

-- 
Alexandre Julliard
julliard at winehq.org