Localisation on paper
If I have to explain the term "localisation" to people, I always try to mention aspects falling outside of translation. Things like date formats and currencies are easy examples to use. Although spell checkers are commonly known, many people see that rather as part of language technology, although it is of course part of adapting a computer system to its users. There are, however, more aspects, with a few nice examples in the world of Free Software.
If you install a Linux distribution in Chinese, the system will install the input methods that make it possible to type Chinese. It involves software as well as "dictionaries" that is required for the input methods. Specific fonts will also be installed that might not be installed otherwise, especially because of the size (good Chinese fonts can take up quite a bit of hard drive space). Firefox gives the opportunity to specify special search engines for a language. GCompris has sound files that can be created separately for each language (who's going to help me with the Afrikaans ones?).
Another aspect that one is usually entirely unaware of, is paper sizes. With this I'm not referring to A4 versus A3, but the whole A system (part of ISO 216) versus the American system of paper sizes ("Letter", "Legal", etc.). I guess most South Africans have not yet even seen a sheet of "Letter" size. I don't even know if you'll be able to buy one anywhere. Anyway - we use A4.
These formats have different sizes, and computer programs must know this to be able to do page layout correctly. Mostly this is of no consequence to anybody. Dwayne created locale files for Linux and OpenOffice.org years ago for all the South African languages. These specify that we use A4 in South Africa. On Windows it works differently - it is configured per printer. Of course you can always go and configure these things again, just like with any other setting of the printer.
With this in mind it was a surprise when we realised that Firefox doesn't obey the locale information on Linux, and always uses "Letter" as the page size, even for the Afrikaans edition. In Firefox at about:config you can set the value of "print.postscript.paper_size" to "A4". I wanted to make this change for the Afrikaans version by making a change to the file firefox-l10n.js by fixing this value in JavaScript with:
pref("print.postscript.paper_size", "A4");
However, I was recommended not to do this based on some technical and administrative grounds. Of course it wouldn't be the correct solution (the software should get the setting from the locale data), but I really wanted to correct it for the Afrikaans users of Firefox. Hopefully this can get some attention at some stage. Possibly relevant bug reports at Mozilla:
Thank you to Fabrice Facorat for linking to the extra bug reports.
It is quite sad to see this if you take into account that the American system is basically only used in North America.
Comments
papersize
What does it say in /etc/papersize? I'm pretty sure firefox used to obey that.
This is really annoying...
I have had problems with printout on my Desktop from Firefox, but I did not realize it was this simple... Mostly becouse as far as I can see on my desktop firefox is the ONLY app not picking up the system settings. I mean how hard can it be to parse /etc/pagesize which exists on most modern distributions at least?
Why is "Free Software"
Why is "Free Software" underlined when I hover over it, but not clickable? Is this a localisation issue? :-)
Re: Why is "Free Software"
Thank you for pointing it out. There was a small typing error.
It goes both ways...
Don't forget all the applications (LaTeX being the example that comes to mind right now) that default to A4 and refuse to use Letter, no matter how nicely you ask. I'm not complaining or anything, I'm just observing that this localization problem goes both ways...
Re: It goes both ways...
LaTeX not respecting your wishes in terms of paper size is not correct either, I agree. Long ago people worked out that systems would have to behave differently and worked out ways for software to know this. I haven't worked with anything TeX related recently, so unfortunately can't comment on LaTeX specifically.
For me a few small differences between Firefox and LaTeX on this issue:
Bugzilla links
The right Mozilla bug report is this one : https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=147419.
You also have report on RH, Ubuntu and Mandriva :
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=445610
https://bugs.launchpad.net/firefox/+bug/10910
https://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=45371
It's really a shame to see that this take so long to fixed.
Some unification around CLDR
Caolan McNamara posted about papersizes on his blog.
It seems that OpenOffice.org is aligning paper sizes with the CLDR and that glibc will use CLDR for the next release. I'm certain the South African data across CLDR, OpenOffice.org and glibc is correct. This move will however make it even easier to keep the data correct and might make it easier for Firefox to at least do the right thing if it can't read the users platform choice.
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