GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 326427
content of palettes needs to be rethought
Last modified: 2020-11-06 19:57:43 UTC
Please describe the problem: The current palette list has characters arranged as they are because in the original version of the applet (which I wrote lo these many years ago) it would use the palette with accented versions of the character typed. As far as I can tell, the current version no longer has the ability to get keyboard focus, so this organizing principle is not useful. (I do agree that this was a reasonable change, as it was somewhat unexpected behavior for the applet to grab keyboard focus) Also, at the time I only put Latin-1 characters in, and for the most part this still holds even though it would make sense for other characters to go in now that everything is unicodized. (But, er, Arabic Letter Theh? Is this useful in isolation to anyone?) I suggest organizing the palletes instead by language, for instance using áéíñóúü¿¡ as the palette for Spanish, and having other palettes for other common Latin alphabet using languages. Also, instead of cluttering the palettes with uppercase characters, I suggest making Shift-click select the uppercase version of a character. The tooltips ought to be changed to reflect that this option is available. Steps to reproduce: Actual results: Expected results: Does this happen every time? Other information:
I second this opinion, although I'm not sure about the Shift-click part. I found none of the current palette list useful. Please also add ÄÖÜäöüß for German. Turkish people would find ışğçöü good to have. Having commonly used math/logic symbols would be nice, too. - Satoshi
Well I guess: - For most latin languages additional several characters - Greek-most popular symbols (lambda, pi, ...) - Basic math symbols - Typographic
Created attachment 145028 [details] Proposed palettes for the Gnome-supported Latin-based languages. [The abbreviation 'spchar(s)' means 'special character(s)'.] The palettes proposed in this file have undergone no selection at all. They may well contain exceedingly rare characters, or old-fashioned ones. They may also well contain more characters than is user-friendly. In other words: accuracy and useability have not been tested yet. The file is structured thus: first half of the file is comma-separated values: Language, lowercase spchars, uppercase spchars, special punctuation Special punctuation is mostly quotation marks, and ¿¡ for the Spanish languages. I gathered the special characters from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/$LANGUAGE_alphabet. I gathered the quotation marks from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark,_non-English_usage Below is a list of the languages Gnome full supports. I have starred the ones with a Latin-based script; those are the languages for which a palette appears in the file. Arabic Assamese *Basque Bengali Bengali (India) Brazilian Portuguese Bulgarian *Catalan *Catalan (Valencian) Chinese (China) Chinese (Hong Kong) Chinese (Taiwan) *Czech *Danish *Dutch English (US, British, Canadian) *Estonian *Finnish *French *Galician *German Greek Gujarati Hebrew Hindi *Hungarian *Italian Japanese Kannada Korean *Lithuanian Macedonian Malayalam Marathi *Norwegian Bokmål *Norwegian Nynorsk Oriya *Polish *Portuguese Punjabi *Romanian Russian *Serbian *Slovenian *Spanish *Swedish Tamil Telugu Thai *Turkish Ukrainian Vietnamese
Please append ĈĉĜĝĤĥĴĵŜŝŬŭ for Esperanto
Created attachment 145043 [details] Proposed palettes for the Gnome-supported Latin-based languages. [The abbreviation 'spchar(s)' means 'special character(s)'.] (2009-10-08 Added ĉĝĥĵŝŭ, ĈĜĤĴŜŬ for Esperanto.) The palettes proposed in this file have undergone no selection at all. They may well contain exceedingly rare characters, or old-fashioned ones. They may also well contain more characters than is user-friendly. In other words: accuracy and useability have not been tested yet. The file is structured thus: first half of the file is comma-separated values: Language, lowercase spchars, uppercase spchars, special punctuation Special punctuation is mostly quotation marks, and ¿¡ for the Spanish languages. I gathered the special characters from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/$LANGUAGE_alphabet. I gathered the quotation marks from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark,_non-English_usage Below is a list of the languages Gnome full supports. I have starred the ones with a Latin-based script; those are the languages for which a palette appears in the file. Arabic Assamese *Basque Bengali Bengali (India) Brazilian Portuguese Bulgarian *Catalan *Catalan (Valencian) Chinese (China) Chinese (Hong Kong) Chinese (Taiwan) *Czech *Danish *Dutch *English (US, British, Canadian) *Esperanto (not supported by Gnome, but I added the palette.) *Estonian *Finnish *French *Galician *German Greek Gujarati Hebrew Hindi *Hungarian *Italian Japanese Kannada Korean *Lithuanian Macedonian Malayalam Marathi *Norwegian Bokmål *Norwegian Nynorsk Oriya *Polish *Portuguese Punjabi *Romanian Russian *Serbian *Slovenian *Spanish *Swedish Tamil Telugu Thai *Turkish Ukrainian Vietnamese
(In reply to comment #4) > Please append ĈĉĜĝĤĥĴĵŜŝŬŭ for Esperanto Done. Oh, and apologies for reposting the long commentary on the file --- I didn't know the commentary on the obsolete one was preserved.
Perhaps it's useful to add a "magical string" that translators can translated into a sequence of characters specific to their language. This means that the awesome Gnome translation teams have the opportunity to come up with the list of characters most appropriate to include in the standard palette of the applet. This would effectively address the still open "this list is guesswork" issue mentioned before. (Note: several other modules have used similar approaches with custom strings in the past, most notably the a11y modules.)
I also want to see this happen. I reinstall periodically, and I'm getting sick of having to rebuild my Spanish character palette every time.
bugzilla.gnome.org is being replaced by gitlab.gnome.org. We are closing all old bug reports in Bugzilla which have not seen updates for many years. If you can still reproduce this issue in a currently supported version of GNOME (currently that would be 3.38), then please feel free to report it at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-applets/-/issues/ Thank you for reporting this issue and we are sorry it could not be fixed.