GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 309657
Capitalization Fixes Patch
Last modified: 2008-01-15 14:04:06 UTC
Filing this bug report on behave of Stephan Binner who mailed me this patch. Attaching it here so that it can be reviewed in detail and is not forgotten. From a first glimpse at the patch it looks like it should just be committed.
Created attachment 48759 [details] [review] patch to fix capitalization issues
Although it may seem that most of the time Title Case is not exactly the same as capitalising the first letter of every word. Short prepositions like "from", "with", "to", "by" and others are not normally capitalised and there are various standard style rules to this effect. Some applications do not always follow these rules but it seems to be largely unintentional. The Gnome developers have been debating capitalising a few exceptional cases for example make the following change s/from/to s/Close without Saving/Close Without Saving/ but the general rule holds and that much of the patch is incorrect. Some of the changes require a lot more context to decide. Title Case is for titles, not the longer more descriptive strings which I suspect some of these may be. I will have to take a closer look tommorow and check the context carefully. I'll recheck the Gnome style guide as well to be sure. (The suggest capitalisation change to the Tips Dialog buttons is correct but I'd recommend using the GTK Stock Next and Previous to remove the need to translate these buttons, and instead get the free Stock translations.) I'm even more uncertain about the cases where capitalisation has been. Reading this patch throws up a lot of minor issues and places where strings could be made more consistent (by removing unnecessary similar variations on the same string). This is not the correct English spelling of fractal + gtk_file_chooser_dialog_new (_("Save as IFS Fraktal File"), Were all these changes made manually or using some clever scripting? I'll look at this again more carefully tomorrow.
Setting version to 2.3.2. The patch applies cleanly against this version.
I've fixed the wrong spelling of Fraktal in the meantime. But that is not really what we are discussing here. I agree with Alan's comments. The patch goes too far in many places. The HIG asks for header capitalization and header style doesn't mean that each word should be written upper-case. There are certainly some strings that should be fixed, mainly button labels that don't follow the capitalization rules. Someone could try to split this into smaller, less controversial, patches.
Created attachment 50811 [details] [review] ellipsis
Created attachment 50812 [details] [review] labels
Created attachment 50813 [details] [review] no or wrong booktitle style
Created attachment 50814 [details] [review] no sentence style
Stephan has split the patch into smaller parts. I would very much appreciate if Alan could review these smaller patches. Setting on the 2.4 milestone so that this isn't forgotten.
2005-08-23 Sven Neumann <sven@gimp.org> * app/actions/gradients-actions.c * app/actions/patterns-actions.c * plug-ins/metadata/interface.c: applied patch from Stephan Binner that fixes wrong use of ellipsis (bug #309657).
2005-08-23 Sven Neumann <sven@gimp.org> * [lots of files]: applied capitalization patches contributed by Stephan Binner. Fixes bug #309657.