Russian translation

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akaGM

Russian translation

Post by akaGM »

I started Russian translation, but as far as I now there is'not any Russian charset in the "system" font vera.ttf...
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Viliam
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New characters

Post by Viliam »

Please try this font - there are some Cyrilic characters, also with some accented Latin characters needed for other translations.

It is based on font Vera, author is Danilo Segan (danilo at gnome dot org).

Please someone replace the font in game with this one.
akaGM

Re: New characters

Post by akaGM »

Viliam, thank you for the answer...

But your message should be addressed to the project mountainers derectly, not to me...

Your Vera looks and works good...
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Post by Dave »

I assume this font is distributable under the GPL, yes?

If so, we can use it.

David
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Post by Dave »

Okay, I have committed a change which allows you to specify which font to use for your translation. I have also added the file Bepa-Roman.ttf. So if you add the line,

Code: Select all

font=Bepa-Roman.ttf
in your translation, it will be used instead of Vera.ttf.

David
“At Gambling, the deadly sin is to mistake bad play for bad luck.” -- Ian Fleming
miyo
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Post by miyo »

Dave wrote:Okay, I have committed a change which allows you to specify which font to use for your translation. I have also added the file Bepa-Roman.ttf. So if you add the line,

Code: Select all

font=Bepa-Roman.ttf
in your translation, it will be used instead of Vera.ttf.
This is in CVS (development) version of Wesnoth -> will be in next release.

- Miyo
akaGM

Post by akaGM »

thanks to all...

but I would prefere any other font because some Russian character are missed in Bepa-Roman.ttf

my I suggest the next scheme?

create, insert, and parse in run-time id-string "user_font" in default.cfg file like this:

user_font="user-font-file-name-at-the-client-side.ttf"

and do not worry about it in the future...

now (myself for the example) simple replace vera.ttf by arial.ttf
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Viliam
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Vera and Bepa fonts

Post by Viliam »

The story of the fonts is the following:

:arrow: Vera was made by Bitstream Inc. and donated to a free software community, namely to GNOME Foundation. Since then, Bitstream Inc. provides virtually no support for the font.

The license says something like: "You are free to use and copy the font. You are also free to change it, but doing so you must also change the name (so that it does not contain strings "Vera" nor "Bitstream")."

I have found that the font does not include characters from some Wesnoth translation languages (Czech, Esperanto, Hungarian, Polish, Slovak - these all using Latin letters). Now, I did not know how to edit TTF fonts, but there seemed to be not too much work to do - basicly to add some accent marks to existing letters. After some searching on the web I have found the right person.

:arrow: There was a modified version of Vera font, done by Danilo Segan, who added some Cyrilic letters. The new version is called Bepa (that's how you write "Vera" in Cyrilic :wink:). As far as I know it contains all letters from original Vera, and some new ones. I asked him to add the missing accented Latin fonts, and here is the result.


Dave: The font Bepa is not distributable under the GPL license, because neither was the original Vera. Technically, the condition "this font (and its modified versions) shall not contain "Vera" or "Bitstream" in it's name" is incompatible with GLP. If this was not a problem with Vera, with Bepa the situation is the same.

I guess there should be only one font (i.e. Bepa) in Wesnoth. Vera is now only a subset of Bepa - why include the same data twice?

Then, maybe it would be a good idea to split it into subsets "Bepa-Latin" (which a superset of the original Vera) and "Bepa-Cyrilic"... I read somewhere that SDL library does read the whole font in memory -- now think what will happen when someone adds the Chinese characters. :shock: As far as I know, no language uses both Latin and Cyrilic characters together, so this can be split. But what about not-translated-yet strings... while playing Russian game, these should be displayed in English. I say... just let there be one font. Bepa.


akaGM: Please try writing to Danilo (danilo at gnome dot org) and tell him which characters are missing... perhaps he will add them too. It would be great to have one nice free font ("free" as in "free speech", not as in "GPL"... :twisted:) covering a lot of languages.
akaGM

Post by akaGM »

Viliam

I think that my proposal (let user-player to select own preferable font) is more simplest to resolve the problem.
Moreover you and i can recompile sources with new settings.
But the most simplified method is replacing original font by new one at the player's PC.

I recomend using arial bold (wintel platform) with all font_size=11 at the default.cfg theme.
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Viliam
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Good defaults

Post by Viliam »

If user could select a font, this would be great! This could be in game options, something like "[x] Use custom font: (font), (size)." Perhaps the best place to store the font is "preferences", not "default.cfg".

However, if the game comes with a font, it should come with a font that fits all (or at least most of) translation languages. If it does make sense to add font "Vera" in program resources, it make twice so to add that font extended.

:wink: Anyway, I want to help font "Bepa" spread through the world. It sucks terribly when most of nice fonts include only 90% of my (Slovak) alphabet.
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Re: Good defaults

Post by miyo »

Viliam wrote:However, if the game comes with a font, it should come with a font that fits all (or at least most of) translation languages.
No. Game can be translated to many languages and we can have a system that let's translators define font to be used - when that translation is added to Wesnoth as official translation we can also add the font. Very few fonts support e.g. Tengwar.

It is also possible that different fonts look better on different languages. Bitstream Vera is nice font for english, some other might look better with French, Russian, Quenya, etc. Now it is choice for the translator what looks good.

- Miyo
akaGM

Re: Good defaults

Post by akaGM »

May anyone describe the method (which will or already implemented) of using additional font in details?

default.cfg? sample-trans.cfg? or smth else...

thanks in advance
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Viliam
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Font and languages

Post by Viliam »

miyo: We should probably differentiate between languages that use different character groups (Latin, Cyrilic, Katagana, Thai, Devanagari,...), and languages that use diferent subset of the same character group (e.g. Latin = English, German, French, Spanish, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Hungarian).

I agree that some font may be nicer for Latin texts, some other for Cyrilic, yet another for Tengwar.

But, for example Spanish uses most of the English characters, and one more: "N+tilde". So we should use the same font for English and Spanish, because (unless the "N+tilde" character is extremely ugly) if the English texts look good, so will the Spanish ones. The only possible problem is if the character "N+tilde" would be missing in the font. In such (hypothetical) situation, would you prefer adding this one missing character to font, or using two different fonts?

Fortunately for Spanish users, all English, Spanish and probably also French characters are included in Bitstream Vera, because these languages are included in Latin-1 character set -- most of fonts are designed for this charset. However, there are other languages using Latin characters, outside the Latin-1 charset, where the situation is very similar to one described above -- there are only 2 characters missing in Hungarian, 6 characters in each of Slovak, Czech, Polish and Esperanto.

So, I want to use Bepa font with Slovak and Esperanto translations. The decision about other languages is up to the others -- I only suggest that for Latin and Cyrilic letters it could be less work to extend Bepa than to find another nice and free font that includes all needed letters.

akaGM: Is Arial freely available on Linux platform?
ettin
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Re: Font and languages

Post by ettin »

Viliam wrote:But, for example Spanish uses most of the English characters, and one more: "N+tilde". So we should use the same font for English and Spanish, because (unless the "N+tilde" character is extremely ugly) if the English texts look good, so will the Spanish ones. The only possible problem is if the character "N+tilde" would be missing in the font. In such (hypothetical) situation, would you prefer adding this one missing character to font, or using two different fonts?
I would prefer to use another font (I don't know how to add a character). I don't see any problem on using two different fonts.
Viliam wrote:akaGM: Is Arial freely available on Linux platform?
AFAIK, Arial (and other Microsoft Fonts) are free (as in beer), but can't be packaged and distributed.

Freely distributable fonts: http://grsites.com/fonts/
ix

Post by ix »

2akaGM: please contact with me (x at id dot ru). I have done a good piece of work on Russian translation too, so we could make a group. I think the translation must be done perfectly - at least I could watch over it to find errors and typos, because I'm skilled in that :)
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