It'd be nice to be able to output strings with correct open- and close-quotes. It's a bit tricky; many programs need to operate without gettext when it's not available, so the quotes can't be put in source directly (ignoring UTF8-in-source issues.) I've thrown together a small script to generate en.po from a default.pot, changing ` and ' to ‘ and ’, and " to “ and ”, attempting to leave apostrophes alone. It's fairly (embarassingly) ugly; my Perl is rusty. I'm sure it doesn't parse all potfiles cleanly, and it definitely doesn't handle all uses of ' correctly; but it's a start, and it seems to handle everything in lftp (the only program I've tried it with.) A downside is needing to edit Makefile.in.in to call this; many programs already have to edit it for various reasons anyway, however. An option to not use these translations (for programs using it specifically) would be useful, as a lot of terminals support UTF-8 but don't handle those particular characters correctly yet. (Even PuTTY--Windows SSH terminal--has this problem with MS Mincho, though Lucida Console works fine.) It might be useful to also translate `` and '' to “ and ”. Suggestions or alternatives? -- Glenn Maynard
Attachment:
trans_quotes.pl
Description: Perl program