About screen translation improvement

[jazzynico]

Some thoughts for future about screen translations...

Option 1. No translation at all. Everyone uses the default "Draw freely" about screen. Nothing to do after the winning svg is added to the trunk. Why not? After all, "Draw freely" is not translated on the web site, and it doesn't hurt that much...

Option 2 (current 0.47 option). Some translations. Translators have to find out how to tweak the default about.svg, or not.

Option 3. Everything (or so) is translated.
Drawbacks (if there's no improvement):
1. "Draw freely" is not in the po files, and thus we have no translation reference;
2. We need a file for each translation;
3. Some more mebioctets added to the packages;
4. The translators need to tweak the default about.svg.
5. Almost impossible to automate.

If we want option 3, we need to find a way to make things easier. Some ideas (connected to the drawbacks):
1. Add the string "Draw freely" (a real text string, not converted to path) somewhere in Inkscape (in the default about.svg file?) so that it is translatable in the po files. Or write a reference page on the wiki.
3. Draw the "Draw freely" in an external file (one for each translation) and include it in the default about.svg (based on Valessio Brito's idea
<http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.graphics.inkscape.translator/903>, except that we can't use a real text).
3bis. Use Scour output to reduce the file size (ok, ScislaC doesn't want it..., see Bug #387967).
3ter. Use svgz output to reduce the file size even more.
4 and 5. Always use a freely available font (with Cyrillic, Chinese, Japanese, etc. support?), and keep the string easy to modify (0.47 is, 0.46+dev is not...).
5bis. Automate the translated files generation so that no translation is required. Possible steps:
   1. Create the original about.svg with a real text, not converted to path.
   2. Create the translated about screens with the po files.
   3. Tweak each translated file in order to get the same aspect as the original one (change the font if needed for Asian or Cyrillic characters).
   4. Convert text to path.
1-5. A bit extreme: don't use the "Draw freely" string... (and we're back to option 1)

[jazzynico (jazzynico)]

Option 1 for Inkscape 0.48...
Nobody commented this report; therefore it's difficult to say what should be done in the next version.

[su_v (suv-lp)]

Personally, I'm fine with (or even prefer?) using "Draw freely" as is (untranslated) in the about-screen (but I usually use the English GUI, so I'm not really qualified to comment ;-) )