Francois Gouget fgouget@free.fr writes:
This is the next step in making full use of the PO files for translating Wine. But how to get there is unclear, hence this RFC.
The issue with dialogs is that in RC files all the dialog and control sizes are hardcoded. For instance in the line below '208, 6, 56, 14' represent the x-left, y-top, width and height of the button:
DEFPUSHBUTTON "Save As", IDOK, 208, 6, 56, 14, BS_DEFPUSHBUTTON | WS_GROUP | WS_TABSTOP
The problem is that once translated to French, for instance, the label becomes 'Enregistrer sous' which is much longer and may require enlarging the button. But RC files do not contain the information needed to do that automatically. For instance they don't specify enlarging this button requires enlarging the 'Cancel' and 'Help' buttons below too.
So how do we solve this problem?
There's another option: design the dialogs with enough spare room that most languages would fit, and maintain language-specific RC files for the special cases that really can't be accommodated. Ideally, a tool would be written to warn about a translation overflowing the available space, so that it can be looked into. Not very satisfying, but a lot simpler than the other options...