Changing the -

[ancestral]

Copied from Format of Attacks.

Yeah this is turning into a rant Just a fair warning, hehe.

At which point is it a minus sign?

Well… actually… it's not a true minus sign at all!

Typographically, a minus sign would usually be slightly longer. I'm sure Wesnoth uses a hyphen-minus (like I just typed here), which is associated with every standard computer keyboard. It's sort of a general-purpose hyphen. But a true minus sign '−' is actually slightly longer.

As below, these are dashes, hyphens, minus signs and bars that are in most major fonts, including Deja Vu Sans, which is what Wesnoth uses:

‐ (hyphen) 7‐3
– (en dash) 7–3
‒ (figure dash) 7‒3
- (hyphen-minus) 7-3 #what Wesnoth uses
− (minus sign) 7−3
— (em dash) 7—3
― (horizontal bar) 7―3

Annoyingly, Wesnoth uses the lazy form "--" for an em dash for types of attacks which follow the damage line. I'd love to see true em dashes myself (there's no advantage to having a double hyphen), like "melee—blade" instead of "melee--blade", and "ranged—pierce" instead of "ranged--pierce". It's not much different than using an ellipsis (…) in place of three periods (...) or a single right quote ( ’ ) in place of an apostrophe ( ' ).

Sadly, most people don't care about good typography anymore Which is a shame. There is much beauty to be found in the written languages around us, in very subtle ways.

[Newell]

Somebody concerned about dashes! I think I'm in love.

[Cloud]

I agree totally. I like em dashes for their obviousness, a hypen or minus sign just isn't what should be used in the situation. Then again I'm the kind of person that gets annoyed when a TV show uses all lower case for it's title. All capitals, I let them get away with. Small caps, fine. All lower case... it just isn't right! It take virtually no added effort to press the shift key!

Bringing me neatly to the slight annoyance that abilities and attack names in Wesnoth are all lower case. I myself would never let such a travesty occur, but it wasn't my decision to make, so I'll shut up and stop complaining about it.

After all, except for capital letters, my grammar follows a different logic to all else. A special logic.

(Why do I feel I digress to much now-a-days?)

[Simons Mith]

I agree totally. I like em dashes for their obviousness, a hypen or minus sign just isn't what should be used in the situation. Then again I'm the kind of person that gets annoyed when a TV show uses all lower case for it's title. All capitals, I let them get away with. Small caps, fine. All lower case... it just isn't right! It take virtually no added effort to press the shift key!

Bringing me neatly to the slight annoyance that abilities and attack names in Wesnoth are all lower case. I myself would never let such a travesty occur, but it wasn't my decision to make, so I'll shut up and stop complaining about it.

After all, except for capital letters, my grammar follows a different logic to all else. A special logic.

(Why do I feel I digress to much now-a-days?)

While I see your point, I think what we have is a legitimate sylistic choice; the trend tends to be that phrases that start off capitalised become lower-case as they become increasingly accepted. Go back to early versions of Dracula and you'll find 'Vampire' and 'Undead' in capitals. Today that looks odd. Similarly, some phrases start out as two words, then become hyphenated, then become a single compound word. Double spaces between sentences are falling out of favour. Apostrophised words used to retain spaces; for example, once upon a time do n't used to be quite correct. Overall the trend is towards simplifying, omitting needless punctuation. But this just makes space for new phrases, sayings, brand names etc. which start out capitalised and marked with TM and R symbols before they too begin to 'erode'.

In BFW, quite where we draw the line on all of these issues is somewhat open to debate, but on the whole the Wesnoth prose tends to be leading-edge rather than conservative.

[ancestral]

Hey thanks mods for splitting this for me . It’s a pesky thing I was considering asking formally in a new thread.

Coders: I’m wondering if a script, whether it’s part of a script like wmllint or just stand‑alone, might ease conversion of proper punctuation, kind of like the Wikipedia bots that go around fixing bad grammar and such, would go through scenario files and change punctuation correctly. (I’m also a little bit of a Perl junkie, so I might be able to write something dirty and quick too.)

Only text being outputted to the screen would need changing, except for some characters that are compiled in source (like that pesky double hyphen‑minus used for damage types).

Perhaps I can review all the small characters that would deserve changing:

Code: Select all

-- or ' - ' (sandwiched by spaces) becomes an em dash — (u2014)
- becomes a non‑breaking hyphen¹ ‑ (u2011)
- (where ranges are concerned²) becomes an en dash – (u2013)
' becomes either a left or right single quote ‘ or ’ (u2018, u2019)
" becomes either a left or right double quote “ or ” (u201C, u201D)
... becomes an ellipsis … (u2026)

¹ To avoid words and especially names getting unfairly hyphenated due to long messages.
² Especially in years, like 243–248, or 2–4 P.M.

References

• Wikipedia: Dash
• cafedave.net: Dashes and Hyphens
• A List Apart: The Trouble With EM ’n EN (and Other Shady Characters)
• Typography for Lawyers: Straight Quotes and Curly Quotes
• Safalra’s Website: Punctuation On The Web

See also

• Users’ Forum: Minor game text improvements

And finally, from here on in, ?! (or is it !?) shall be changed to the interrobang ‽

…Okay, just kidding on that last one.

[Simons Mith]

Coders: I’m wondering if a script, whether it’s part of a script like wmllint or just stand‑alone, might ease conversion of proper punctuation...

Perhaps I can review all the small characters that would deserve changing:

Code: Select all

-- or ' - ' (sandwiched by spaces) becomes an em dash — (u2014)
- becomes a non‑breaking hyphen¹ ‑ (u2011)
- (where ranges are concerned²) becomes an en dash – (u2013)
' becomes either a left or right single quote ‘ or ’ (u2018, u2019)
" becomes either a left or right double quote “ or ” (u201C, u201D)
... becomes an ellipsis … (u2026)

¹ To avoid words and especially names getting unfairly hyphenated due to long messages.
² Especially in years, like 243–248, or 2–4 P.M.

Might it be better to add glyph support to WML? If so, what's the best way to encode all of these?

1. Named HTML entities such as …, – et al? Pros: Easier to see from the entity what you'll get. Cons: Not every code we might conceivably want has a named HTML entity, although almost all do.
2. Numbered HTML entities such as &#x201D? Pros: Consistent display style, complete unicode coverage. Cons: Having to look up all those darn numbers.
3. Just pasting the characters in. Pros: Closest to WYSIWYG in even a text editor. Works OK for users with non-Latin alphabets. Cons: Provided your text editor handles unicode, that is.

I've listed these in my order of preference, but I'd be OK with any of these.

[ancestral]

Here’s what I think:

• Scenario and campaign developers should not have to type in curly quotes and non‑breaking hyphens. Definitely do not create more work for everyone!
• The intention here is to address issues in mainline scenarios, but to also make it available to other people with their own projects.
• I propose creating a script that will go through and apply proper curly quotes and dashes. Otherwise it could be done by hand. It wouldn’t take more than a couple of hours.

This is just addressing the English "translation" (i.e. no translation) of the game. As far as i18n, if there are other languages using the same conventions then this could solve the same problem. However, if there’s incorrect punctuation or grammar in another language, I feel that’s up to the translators for that language to manage.

Simons Mith: #3 is my choice. For one, scenario developers don’t have to do any of this on their own content if they don’t want to. They can ignore this altogether.

Or, if a script is made, they could simply run the tool before they release their content.

Or they could just download a utf-8 compatible text editor.

[Cloud]

While I see your point, I think what we have is a legitimate sylistic choice; the trend tends to be that phrases that start off capitalised become lower-case as they become increasingly accepted. Go back to early versions of Dracula and you'll find 'Vampire' and 'Undead' in capitals. Today that looks odd. Similarly, some phrases start out as two words, then become hyphenated, then become a single compound word. Double spaces between sentences are falling out of favour. Apostrophised words used to retain spaces; for example, once upon a time do n't used to be quite correct. Overall the trend is towards simplifying, omitting needless punctuation. But this just makes space for new phrases, sayings, brand names etc. which start out capitalised and marked with TM and R symbols before they too begin to 'erode'.

In BFW, quite where we draw the line on all of these issues is somewhat open to debate, but on the whole the Wesnoth prose tends to be leading-edge rather than conservative.

Totally understand and respect that, personally I see every line break as a new sentence (even if the period hasn't been included) so therefore it should be capitalized. But that's how it's been done, and it's one of the most minor of minor points and so barely worth continuing on about. I'll stop there

Now if the title had been written as "battle of wesnoth" I would be campaigning, unless it looked absolutely amazing compared to a capitalized version.

(Could the reason be that, at the time Dracula was written, vampires and the undead were quite uncommon words, and though of as proper nouns, while now-a-days they have shifted to become just nouns?)

[Simons Mith]

(Could the reason be that, at the time Dracula was written, vampires and the undead were quite uncommon words, and though of as proper nouns, while now-a-days they have shifted to become just nouns?)

Yes. In Wesnoth's case, I suppose e.g. the unusual word Wose ought to be capitalised throughout. But that looks odd alongside lower-cased trolls, elves, orcs...

[Kess]

1. Named HTML entities such as …, – et al? Pros: Easier to see from the entity what you'll get. Cons: Not every code we might conceivably want has a named HTML entity, although almost all do.
2. Numbered HTML entities such as &#x201D? Pros: Consistent display style, complete unicode coverage. Cons: Having to look up all those darn numbers.
3. Just pasting the characters in. Pros: Closest to WYSIWYG in even a text editor. Works OK for users with non-Latin alphabets. Cons: Provided your text editor handles unicode, that is.

In my opinion, #3 is definately the way to go. A text editor not supporting (basic) Unicode really should be pressed to do so.

(I’ve already started to correct this In the Swedish translation, though the typographical rules are different, of course.)