GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 556713
inconsistency in report options
Last modified: 2018-06-29 22:11:22 UTC
There's some inconsistency in report options. It's somewhat frustrating when translating, and a bit misleading for a user too. "Start Date" can also be "From", "Start Date:" depending on report. Same for end date. I would suggest using "Start Date" on every report ("From" is difficult to translate if it gets used elsewhere). "reports currency" vs "report's currency". "report accounts", "accounts to include". Some options have ":", others "?" at the end while most have nothing. I would also suggest renaming "defaults" button to "use defaults". This is similar to bug 542537. Other information:
There also seems to be "financial period" and "accounting period". There's probably no difference between them.
I heard that this might have been already changed in HEAD: "Previous Year End" "End of the Previous Year" There's also problem with this (all are defined): "Previous Year Start" "Beginning of the previous calendar year" "Start of previous fiscal year"
I agree the english strings are inconsistent and should be changed. Can you provide a patch? That would be great. If you need instructions on how to create this, don't hesitate to ask here or on gnucash-devel. Thanks.
So far I have changed "From" -> "Start Date" "Report currency" -> "Report's currency" "Report Accounts","Accounts to include" -> "Accounts" In the transaction report I also decided to change "Filter Accounts" with "Filter By...", otherwise I found the panel slightly confusing. All of these changes could be done without breaking the string freeze we're in now.
Additionally, I have now changed all occurences of "Current/Previous Year Start/End" into "Start of this/previous year", which aligns with the prases used in the general preferences. As for ":" and "?", the ":" is used in option descriptions that appear before the input field/drop down/button for that option. In case of check boxes and radio buttons, the descriptions come after the check box/radio buttons, and there is no ":". As far as I could detect this is consistent in all options. I agree the question marks are not really needed. I can't change them now though because of the string freeze as that would introduce changed strings to translate. The same goes for changing "Defaults" to "Use defaults": I can't do that now without breaking string freeze. In reply to comment 1: The GnuCash preferences define an "Accounting Period" so the reports should use that term as well instead of "Financial Period". The code however talks of a "Fiscal Year" (which is also appearing in some tooltips). What term best describes what we are dealing with here ? "Fiscal year" is not my preference, because the preferences allow to define any arbitrary time frame as an accounting period. My preference goes to "Accounting period" and make it consistent everywhere. Comments ? In reply to comment 2: I fixed "Previous Year End" and "Previous Year Start". The other entries, "End of the Previous Year", "Beginning of the previous calendar year" and "Start of previous fiscal year" are tooltips used for the the period selectors. They could be made more consistent, but stringfreeze is currently preventing this.
Created attachment 165422 [details] [review] Use consistent strings in reports The attached patch should fix the remaining outstanding issues of this bug. Applying this patch now would break string freeze.
Note that the patch uses "Accounting Period". If "Fiscal Year" or "Financial Period" is preferred, it should be revised.
One final additional commit (r19371) changes "Defaults" to "Use defaults" and includes some strings I missed before.
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