Ubiquity Slideshow for Ubuntu

[Dylan McCall]

On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 6:50 AM, Milo Casagrande<milo at casagrande.name> wrote:
> 2009/6/12  <yann_ubuntu-1 at yahoo.fr>:
>>
>>
>> Hi Dylan. Very good idea this slideshow !
>> I am just wondering:
>> - how/where can I help to translate it?  (there are texts and screenshots to translate.)
>> - how translated versions will be included in the live-session?
>
> I'm also wondering if it is going to get into the Live CD. If it is,
> from my POV, it needs to be translated, maybe with html2po, but it
> need to be addressed in some way.
>
> Ciao.

Certainly :)

That has been sadly glossed over so far, but not forgotten! There'll
be translation infrastructure in place, hopefully some time in the
next few weeks. Indeed, html2po is ever handy.

Ubiquity does this with a layer on top of GetText, where for each bit
of text the command get_string (from il8n.py) is called. We don't
really have that capacity in HTML land - at least not without paying
in severe headaches.
It strikes me as nicely possible that we could actually generate
different .html files for each translation, (eg:
software-updates.html.fr), then have some javascript in Slideshow.html
to pick the right ones. This could be done via po2html with a build
script, or by Ubiquity into /tmp right before it opens the slideshow.
The .html files are extremely small (measured in bytes), so that
shouldn't harm anything and could leave the door open for cool
per-locale details through HTML.
Naturally, the actual translation process could still be done with
good old .po files for the sake of easy workflow through Launchpad.

That's close to my next task, in tandem with Ubiquity calling
Javascript functions in the slideshow document it is displaying.

The slideshow is presently Ubuntu specific, but will be packaged
("next couple weeks" line pops up again) in a way that allows another
parallel package to easily replace it. Ubiquity looks for a slideshow
in a specific place, and that place would be the same whether you have
a Kubuntu or Ubuntu or Xubuntu one installed. Ugly, but it should
work.


Thanks,
Dylan McCall

PS: Not sure if I'll be pushing this change soon since I'm a tad busy,
but there's a file called slides/MenuTest.html that demonstrates my
attempt at subtly showing the user "Hey, this application I'm
mentioning is in the menu and can be opened by going to..." without
making a whole line of boring text. It lets a slide introduce an
application with styling identical to the main menu. I don't have a
way to test it, really, so do you think this will do what I hope?