[Koha-translate] to begin with...

[dbkliv]

nicolas at koha-fr.org wrote:
> dbkliv wrote:
> 
>> kb2qzv at poczta.wp.pl wrote:
>>
>>> Hi all,
>>> I have noticed that the french translation of the template files 
>>> contains
>>> diacritical characters which are represented with the &...; sequence
>>
>>
> We used the &...; sequence for want of a better solution : that way 
> we're pretty sure the characters will display properly, but it isn't 
> really easy to use : after a few é and ô you tend to get 
> lost in your own translation... Any suggestion of a better solution 
> welcomed.
> 

A few things I dislike about HTML entities:

a) They expand the apparent length of translated text. Alignment
    gets confusing.

b) They're poorly documented for some languages; for others,
    non-existant.


> [...]
> 
>>
>>> Since I have used Kate Editor under redhat where polish diacritics are
>>> available directly I wonder whether I could leave it that way. Must I
>>> convert all the polish characters (ISO-8859-2, I hope) into the 
>>> &....; html
>>> sequence?
>>
>>
>>
>> ISO-10646 (Unicode) is probably the strongest bet here.
>>
> I'd be happy to hear more about that...

I was suggesting ISO-10646 rather than ISO-8859-2. There would still
be some work involved to convert from html entities into whatever
codeset/s Koha decides to use.

http://www.unicode.org for more info.