Square blocks shown instead of translated strings in some areas (when language is set to marathi)

[Onkar Shinde]

Binary package hint: wesnoth-1.8

I am taking a look at translated UI of Wesnoth and also trying to do some of my own translations. The language of translations is Marathi (mr_IN.UTF-8). The problem is that I see square blocks in some areas of game instead of translated strings. This seems to be mostly affect action widgets (where I click mouse) such as menus, buttons etc. There is no problem in translation display for labels such as story narration, unit descriptions, dialogs etc.

Please find attached the screenshots. One shows problem while other doesn't. Please note that translation strings shown here are not present in original package. But the issue is seen with the strings available in package also (specifically 'Actions' menu after starting a campaign).

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
Package: wesnoth-1.8-core 1:1.8-3ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-27.49-powerpc 2.6.32.26+drm33.12
Uname: Linux 2.6.32-27-powerpc ppc
Architecture: powerpc
Date: Mon Dec 27 09:52:08 2010
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_IN
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: wesnoth-1.8

[Thomas Collingwood (thomas-collingwood)]

I can reproduce this problem. Seems to be an issue with the fonts.

[Hans Joachim Desserud (hjd)]

I can confirm this issue in wesnoth 1:1.8.6-1 on Ubuntu Oneiric. I have attached a screenshot demonstrating one dialog which shows translated strings and one menu which show the squares. I am not sure what's causing this, but I find it odd that it is possible to show the correct characters in some places, but not all.

[Rhonda D'Vine (rhonda)]

Marathi is one of the languages which isn't translated too well at all, you can see the stats of the translation work of wesnoth here: http://www.wesnoth.org/gettext/

Unfortunately it is even unknown to the developers whether the GUI code would be able to cope with a font for that language. The only way to get this bug "fixed" for me is thus to disable the language from selection, at all. I'm uncertain if that is really something we should do, though.

Thanks for understanding,
Rhonda

[Espreon (majora700)]

Note that for any hope whatsoever of having the affected GUI elements render devanagari, the Devanagari plane needs to be covered by fonts.cfg (which is in data/hardwired/fonts.cfg) and there needs to be a font that has devanagari glyphs in the game's fonts directory.

So, do the following:

1. Put a font with devanagari glyphs in the game's fonts directory.

2. Append the font's filename to the order= list in fonts.cfg.

2. Append the font's family name to the family_order= list in fonts.cfg.

3. Put this after the last [font] codeblock before "#ifdef FOR_COMPATIBILITY_SAKE":

[font]
    name="<filename>"
    codepoints=2304-2431
[/font]

4. Restart the game and take a look

Even then, I'm not sure if GUI1 can properly shape devanagari. I guess I'll try this out myself and see what happens.

[Espreon (majora700)]

OK, I tried it, and GUI1 at least renders Devanagari, but I'm not sure if it's being shaped right since I can't read Devanagari. At least it doesn't look completely disastrous.

[Espreon (majora700)]

Note that you may wish to also cover the Devanagari Extended plane too. To do that, make the [font] codeblock I mentioned earlier look like this:

[font]
    name="<filename>"
    codepoints=2304-2431,43232-43259
[/font]

[Rhonda D'Vine (rhonda)]

One thing to "fix" this is to disable the language from the selection all together. This though might hinder translators in that language and won't improve the situation to get the translation into better shape. Thus I am setting this bugreport to status "won't fix" and suggested to upstream translation team to at least also add font information into the translation so that people interested in giving it a try will be able to install the corresponding font and work from there. The competion state of the translation though doesn't warrant any dependency on such a font and thus none is included (and won't be, for the forseeable future).

As long as not even the basic "wesnoth" domain is translated completely it doesn't make sense to have this language fully supported. There is talks going on about potentially having a build switch to disable such languages during the build process, but I'm uncertain whether that might happen (and this is nothing that will happen inside Ubuntu or Debian, this has to happen in the Upstream code).

Thanks for understanding,
Rhonda