In my application I use the ICU message format to localize user-visible strings for different languages. A relevant (contrived) example would be:
(EN) Click on this link to find out more.
(DE) Dieser Link führt zu weiteren Informationen.
The issue I ran into is interactivity and styling for this sentence. I want the bold fragments to be clickable links in the sentence and style them differently.
The go-to solution for such cases would be to separate the bold words and make them a separate ICU message and handle this message separately in the app (to apply interactivity and styling), perhaps like a button. The problem is how this should be implemented in the context of a sentence, since the language prescribes different number and order of sentence-fragments:
(EN) (Click on) (this link) (to find out more)
(DE) (Dieser Link) (führt zu weiteren Informationen)
I could of course feed the string of the link as a parameter into an ICU message containing the surrounding sentence to obtain the sentence as one string, but then I can't apply the link-action or styling in-app, since I end up with one sentence.
What is a solution to this problem? For context: The app is written in flutter targeting mobile.
Related
Does anyone know if there is a shortcut, feature or plugin available for Microsoft Word that can make highlighted text or styles in method camel case, so variableName not just ClassName.
I know there is the Capitalise Each Word shortcut but this also capitalises the first word.
I know its not really Programmy but its worth a shot, cheers!
Like so many things MicroSoft, they develope an application until it is works for 80% the cases it should support and call it done.
None of their office word application have any concept of a "Camel Case" word such as "camelCaseWord".
In my case, I would like a spell check to make each word in a camel case word to spell check independently.
In your case, I would suggest you create your own macro that would capitalize the first letter of each word in the selected text then remove the spaces between words. In fact someone already wrote one:
Convert Highlighted Text revised
I am developing a program that give the correct format of text for example if I write سلام so it give FEB3, FEE0, FE8E and FEE2 witch are Unicode of سـ, ـلـ,ﺎ,ـم, then if I write ټول there is Unicode for character ټ which is 067C, but there is not Unicode for character ټـ which is Initial Contextual form.
So I found Unicode for isolated of ټ,ګ,ځ,څ,ڼ,ښ,ډ,ۍ,ړ,ې in the Wikipedia, but I can't find Unicode of Contextual forms.
For example Unicode of ټـ ,ـټـ,ـټ.
I am waiting for response if any one knows the solution of this problem.
thanks...
A Unicode character is intended to be abstract in the sense that it doesn't have a particular presentation form. The preferred way to display cursive scripts like Arabic is to store the standard, non-contextual forms, and convert them to their cursive forms at display time - that is, as one of the final stages of a text display system in an operating system or word processor.
The cursive forms are usually provided as glyphs in the font, and are chosen using information in tables in the font file embodying the contextual rules.
Unicode stores quite a large number of Arabic contextual forms, but only for compatibility with older encodings, and with traditional metal type, for which only a finite number of physical glyphs can be supplied. Unfortunately for your purposes, these contextual forms don't cover all the extended characters used in languages other than Arabic, such as the example you give, which is U+067C ARABIC LETTER TEH WITH RING, used in Pashto.
It's very unlikely that further contextual Arabic forms will be added, in my opinion. Therefore your proposed program cannot be made to work, at least according to its current design.
Earlier Unicode versions included separate codes for the different forms of Arabic letters for all letters except some. Arabic letters are used to write Pashto, Farsi, Urdu, and few other languages. The letters that were used in Arabic, Farsi, and may be a couple more languages were assigned different codes for each form of the their letters. However, the letters used only by less taught languages like Pashto, which you are asking about, were assigned codes for only the isolated forms. In the later versions of the Unicode, it was decided to only assign a single code to each letter, leaving Pashto only letters to have codes for only the isolated forms.
Actually there was no need to have a separate code for each form which was a bad decision made by the earlier Unicode versions. A rendering engine (editors, and other programs that deal with plain text) should account for the different forms of each letter and display the correct form according to its position.
I have a Word-Document with some links to cells in Excel-files. In Word, I can get a context menu, that leads to a window with all the links of the document. There, I can see and manipulate properties of the links.
Amongst others, there is the part "Updatemethod for chosen link" (words may differ, I translated it from the German version), I have two radio-boxes with "automatic" / "manual". And a Checkbox "locked".
I want to modify (especially the locked-checkbox) these properties with OpenXML, but I did not find the place, where in the model this information is stored. I printed the OuterXML for a link with locked checked and for a link with locked unchecked, but did not find any differences in the parameter field (\a \f 5 \h * MERGEFORMAT - for both!)
Anyone knows, how I can modify this with OpenXML SDK?
Thanks in advance,
Frank
Word has different ways to represent the LINK in Office Open XML depending partly on the format of the link (e.g. whether you Paste Link to an object or to plain text).
For example, if you paste a link to a "Microsoft Excel Worksheet Object", although Word displays a LINK field in the document, the XML does not actually record the field code using either the simple or more complex encoding for field codes. It actually encodes the object in a <w:object> element that records information about a "shape", with the shape type in <v:shapetype>, the shape itself in <v:shape>, and information about the OLE link in <o:OLEObject>
In that case, Automatic link updating is recorded using
<o:OLEObject UpdateMode='Always'> for automatic links
and
<o:OLEObject UpdateMode='OnCall'> for manual links.
Whether or not the link is Locked is recorded in
<o:OLEObject><o:LockedField></o:LockedField<o:OLEObject>
(either as "false" or "" AFAICS).
Word reconstructs the LINK field code from the w:object information when it displays the document.
However, if you paste the link as text, the XML Word records will contain a complex field code construction, starting with a <w:fldChar w:fldCharType='begin' /> element.
In that case, the fact that the link is locked is indicated by a value of '1" in the w:fldLock attribute, and probably the absence of that attribute if it is not locked. e.g.
<w:fldChar w:fldCharType='begin' w:fldLock='1' />
In either case, an automatic link is indicated by the presence of the \a switch in the field code (reconstructed in the case of the first example). If there is no \a switch, it's not an automatic link.
That may not cover all the possible cases but should give you some clues about where to look in the XML.
Is there an unicode symbol for "n/a"? There are some fractions like ½, but a n/a symbol seems to be missing.
If there is none, what would be the most appropriate unicode symbol to use for n/a in a website (which should be contained in common fonts, to avoid needing a webfont)?
Looking at the Unicode code charts, I do not see a single N/A symbol. I do, however, see ⁿ (U+207F) and ₐ (U+2090), which you could separate with / (U+002F) eg: ⁿ/ₐ, or ̷ (U+0337), eg: ⁿ̷ₐ, or ̸ (U+0338), eg: ⁿ̸ₐ. Probably not what you are hoping for, though. And I don't know if "common" fonts implement them, either.
For future reference, the fastest way I know to answer questions like the OP's when I have them myself is to go to unicodelookup.com, because of the way it works: there's a search bar at the top, and you just type a string and it will return any and all unicode characters containing that string (this is also a great way to discover new and useful symbols). So in the OP's case, he could proceed like this:
first try entering "not" (without the quotes) in the search field
visually scan through the results... doing so would not reveal a "not
applicable" character in this case
try again but this time entering "applic" in the search field
again, doing so would not turn up anything along the lines of what he's
looking for
At that point he would be reasonably confident the current Unicode standard does not have a "n/a" symbol.
If you use Firefox you can define a keyword like "uni" to search that site from the URL bar, meaning any time the browser is open and regardless of what page or site is currently showing, you could do this:
hit [F6]... this moves the cursor to the URL bar at the top
type something like "uni applic" and hit [Enter]... this brings up the
unicodelookup.com website with the search results for "applic" already
showing
For the above to work you would need to define your keyword ("uni" or wtv you prefer) to point to location http://unicodelookup.com/#%s.
There's a Negative Acknowlege icon...
␕ symbol for negative acknowledge 022025 9237 0x2415 ␕
Found by searching negative on the Unicode Lookup site.
I'm not a fan, and for my purposes have just gone with __N/A__ (Markdown..)
I see lots of answers going head-on at the "Not Applicable" abbreviation, without exploring what a symbol is. A quick search for the equivalent phrase "out of scope" brings up a couple of variations on the No symbol: ⃠ – this seems to fit the bill (and since I was looking for a way to represent inapplicability, I'll be using it in my technical document).
Per the Wikipedia article, the Unicode codepoint U+20E0 is a combining character, so it is superimposed on the preceding character; e.g. ! ⃠ overlays an exclamation point. To get it to appear isolated, use a non-breaking space
If you don't want to bother with the combining symbol, the article mentions there's also an emoji U+1F6AB 🚫 but it's typically going to be colored red, or won't render!
There's actually a single character that could be repurposed for this: the "Square Na" character ㎁ (U+3381), which is used to represent the nanoampere in fullwidth (CJK) scripts.
What about the "SYMBOL FOR NULL" ␀ (U+2400)?
I have started to code a multi-language feature for a medium-sized website with a lot of hardcoded text. As the website is supposed to be translated into Japanese and Korean (multibyte character set) I am considering the following:
If I use string externalization, do the strings for Japanese or Korean need to be in unicode form within the locale file (i.e. 台北 instead of 台北 as string value)?
Would it make more sense to store the localization in a DB (i.e. MySQL) and retrieve the respective values via a localization function in PHP?
Your thought input is much appreciated.
Best regards
$0.02 from someone who has some experience with i18n...
Keep your translations in human-readable form, as it will likely be translators and not coders managing these resources.
If this text (hard-coded, you say) is not subject to frequent change, then you may wish to store these resources as files that you read in at runtime.
If this text is subject to frequent change, then you may wish to explore other alternatives for storing resources, such as databases or in-memory key-value stores.
Depending upon your requirements, you may want to consider a mixture of the above.
But I strongly suggest that you avoid mixing code (the HTML character entities) with your translation resources. Most translators will not understand what they mean and may break them when they are translating. And on the flip-side, a programmer may not understand how to insert code or formatting into the translation resources properly, unless they actually understand that language.
tl;dr
- use UTF-8
- don't mix any code/formatting into the translations themselves
- how you store the translations depends upon your requirements
I doubt that string externalization would be your biggest problem. But let me give you some advise.
String externalization
Of course you would need to separate translatable strings from the code. I would recommend storing translation in plain text, UTF-8 encoded file containing key-value pairs:
some.key=some translation
Of course you would need to write a helper script to resolve this at runtime. The script would need to detect end-user's language.
Language detection
Web browsers are so nice to send AcceptLanguage header each time they send a request. What you need to do, is to read the content of this header and check if you support any of the language user has listed. If so, read the resource file (as defined above) and return strings for given language, return your default language otherwise. The code example below will give you the most desired language (which is not necessary the one you support):
<?php
$locale = Locale::acceptFromHttp($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE']);
echo $locale;
?>
This is still, not the biggest of your challenges.
Styles and style sheets
The real problem with multilingual web sites or web applications are styles. People tend to put style definitions in-line, which is problematic to say the least. Also, designers tend to think that Arial is the best font for entire Universe, as well as emphasis always have to come with bolded font. The only problem is, the font might be unreadable under some circumstances.
I must admit, I don't know why it happens, but most of the times web browsers tend to ignore bold attribute for Asian scripts (which is good), but sometimes they do not and it could became a major challenge for end users if your font definition is say font-family:Arial; font-size:10px;.
The other problem could be colors. Depending on your web site design, some colors used might be inappropriate for target customers. That is because we all tend to assign meaning to colors based on our cultural background.
Images containing localizable text could also give you a headache, you would need to either externalize such texts (and write them down just like any other HTML element), or prepare multilingual resources structure (i.e. put all images to directories named after language code ("en", "ja", "ko")).
The real challenge however, are hard-coded formatting tags like <b>, <i>, <u>, <strong>, etc. Nobody should use them nowadays, style classes should be used instead but the common practice is different. You would probably need to replace them with style classes; each element could have more than one style class, which to my surprise is not common knowledge (for example <p class="main boldText">).
OK, once you have your styles externalized, you would probably be forced to implement some sort of CSS Localization Mechanism. This is needed in the lights of what I wrote above. The easiest way to do that is to create directory structure similar to the one I mentioned before - "en" for English base CSS files, "ja" for Japanese and "ko" for Korean, so each language would have their own, separate set of CSS files. This is similar to UI skins, only in that case user won't be able to choose the skin, you will decide on which CSS to present them - you would detect language anyway.
As for in-line style definitions (<p style="whatever">), after you define CSS L10n Mechanism, you could override any style by forcing it with !important keyword. That is, unless somebody in his very wrong mind put this keyword to in-line style definition.
Concatenations
Well, this is your biggest challenge. Even people who understand the need of string externalization tend to concatenate the strings like this:
$result = $label + ": " + $product;
$message = "$your_basket_is + $basket_status + ".";
This poses serious problem for Internationalization (and if it is not resolved for Localization as well). That is because, the order of the sentence tend to be different after translating text into different language (this especially regards to Korean). Also, I showed you hard-coded punctuations, which are not necessary correct for Asian languages. That is what I have to go through on a daily basis :/
What you would probably need to do, is to remove such concatenations, or use some means of message formatting. The PHP example (taken directly from web page I am referencing) would be:
<?php
$fmt = new MessageFormatter("en_US", "{0,number,integer} monkeys on {1,number,integer} trees make {2,number} monkeys per tree");
echo $fmt->format(array(4560, 123, 4560/123));
$fmt = new MessageFormatter("de", "{0,number,integer} Affen auf {1,number,integer} Bäumen sind {2,number} Affen pro Baum");
echo $fmt->format(array(4560, 123, 4560/123));
?>
As you can see in this example, numbers are also formatted to much locale style. This leads us to:
Locale aware formatting
Dates, times, numbers and currencies or other similar information need to be formatted according to user-detected Locale. There is a slight difference here: you should attempt to do that, even if you do not support related language resources (do not have translations). Of course for currency symbol, you would use whatever is your real currency, not the user's default, but the format should respect end user's cultural background.
Summary
I have just presented you with a short introduction to multilingual web site design with focus on Japanese and Korean target markets. If at some point you would need to support Chinese Simplified as well, support for GB18030 encoding would be probably needed as well. This would be very challenging...
You do not want to store all your text as HTML entities. It'll drive you mad. The only reason to do this is if you need to serve your document in an ASCII encoding and cannot embed the characters directly. But in this day and age there's no reason for that; serve your document as UTF-8 and write and store your contents in UTF-8 and be done with it.
Whether or not to store translations in the database depends on many factors, including performance, caching, whether you need to be able to search for the text, whether the text should be editable by non-programmers etc. Usually .mo/.po translation files with gettext are a good way to go unless proven otherwise.