Package Maintainers Flags policy

Ding-Yi Chen dchen at redhat.com
Fri May 22 04:13:16 UTC 2009


於 五,2009-05-22 於 04:58 +0200,Kevin Kofler 提到:
> Ding-Yi Chen wrote:
> > There are no such "standard Chinese IM icons", IM developers can use
> > whatever icons they like to distinguish their input methods.
> 
> And where do they come from and how do they make the user understand what
> they're about to select?

No problem. Normally we just pick the first or significant character of
the input method name. Like "拼" "五", "酷", "倉", or input method
specific icon like "ㄅ".
Smaller characters on the bottom right to show the variance.

If your script is horizontal like English, you can either stretch the
text or leave the button space to show the variance. 

> > key layout icons can do the similar way, icons can be either designed by
> > the key-layout switch developers or community.
> 
> But the icons need to be recognizable by the user! If I draw a beautiful
> flower to represent, say, the German keyboard layout, how do people know
> the flower corresponds to a German keyboard layout? Well, I could use an
> Edelweiss which is common in Austria (which uses the same layout) and
> Bavaria (part of Germany), but it's also common in Alpine regions of Italy,
> in Switzerland and in a few other countries which all do not use the same
> keyboard layout. That kind of regional symbols doesn't work any better than
> flags. A picture of the keyboard with keys printed on it isn't going to
> work either, at the size of a systray icon the letters are all condensed at
> best to single pixels, you can't recognize anything at all.

I agree with your first sentence. But no worry, icons that cannot be
recognized by its users will not get into the package if the developers
and community are sensible.

> 2-letter layout names are the best we can have without flags, but 1. it's
> text, not an icon and 2. the layout names aren't really any more neutral
> than the flags (they are mostly country names, sometimes language names).

Flags do have issues. Haven't you seen the whole thread?
But 2-letter layout name don't. Have you seen any article mention about
it?

BTW, where does the 2-letter layout came from?


> > For example, English and Australian might be somewhat disappointed that
> > their flags are not in the list, while language oriented scheme does not
> > have such problems.
> 
> * The United Kingdom is actually in the list.

But Australia and New zealand are not.


>  The list of keyboard layouts is neither per country nor
> per language.
> 
>         Kevin Kofler

If the list of keyboard layouts is neither per country nor per language,
how come there is a "Show country flags" option?

-- 
Ding-Yi Chen
Software Engineer
Internationalization Group
Red Hat, Inc.

Looking to carve out IT costs?
www.apac.redhat.com/promo/carveoutcosts/




More information about the fedora-devel-list mailing list