[sword-devel] BPBible 0.3

[DM Smith]

On Jun 6, 2008, at 7:13 PM, Ben Morgan wrote:
>
>
> Just a question - do you think that the GUI controls, such as text  
> boxes and lists and what not (everything but the actual text of the  
> module), should be able to have a different font from the actual  
> text? Currently under Windows at least, they would have a different  
> font - arial I think is the default for the html, while it uses the  
> default windows font for the GUI controls (probably verdana or  
> something).

As Peter and I worked on translating BibleDesktop into Farsi we  
discovered many things about fonts and internationalization. The core  
lesson is:

Fonts should be able to be tied to a language for the text that is  
being displayed. While it may be nice to have fonts set per module, it  
is not necessary. When a text consists of multiple languages, each  
piece should be clearly marked (as with xml's xml:lang attribute).

(Actually, it really should be set at the level of "script" but I  
don't know of any formalization of scripts that we could use. (Such as  
ISO-639 for languages). I'm not sure that even if such a notion  
existed whether we could make it understandable to users.)

This lesson should be applied to all widgets.

This is actually quite hard to implement and BD has a ways to go.

In Christ's Service,
	DM