[sane-devel] Encoding of backend translations

[Sergey Vlasov]

On Fri, 1 Mar 2002 14:12:21 +0100
mh <crapsite at gmx.net> wrote:

> I'd just like to ask, whether it would be a problem to use
> UFT8 encoding for the backend translations?
> Reason:
> The KDE i18n framework has been switched to UTF8; .mo files
> generated from .po files encoded e.g. in iso-8859-1 are not
> displayed correctly (missing "Umlaute"/vowel mutations). 
> As far as I know, this wouldn't affect xsane (Oliver?), but
> would make access to the backend translations much easier for
> KDE applications.

The recent GNU gettext (starting with 0.10.36, released in March
2001) has the ability to reencode translations on the fly.  By
default it reencodes to the current locale encoding, but you can
use bind_textdomain_codeset() to select any other encoding
(including UTF-8).

The question is: how many people still have old gettext?  If we
will use UTF8 in backend translations, people using old gettext
will have problems with non-KDE apps.  If we rely on the GNU
gettext reencoding capabilities, this will be the problem for
people which use old gettext and KDE apps.

Also, many programs still cannot work with UTF-8 - this may be a
problem for translators.