394641 - Use one ellipsis character (…) instead of three dots (...) in strings

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 373623

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Simon Paquet [:sipaq]]

Attachment: Patch for .dtd and .properties files

As Firefox and Calendar have already done, Thunderbird should use the ellipsis character "…" consistently throughout its user interface, instead of three dots "..." which take more space.

The attached patch does that consistently for all dtd and properties files in mozilla/mail. Please review! I don't do much TB development, so if someone is more suitable as a reviewer, please re-assign the review.

Comment 1

[Scott MacGregor]

Simon, do you have bugs for calendar and firefox you can link to where similar work happened? 

I noticed you didn't change the names of these labels, won't that prevent localizers from noticing the change? 

Comment 2

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Last I saw, the Firefox version was in bug 373623, which never got around to an answer to "I am unsure how this should be percolated to l10ns" because it stalled on a lack of accessibility testing, though bug 390282 made an end-run around that for cropped labels.

Comment 3

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

The ellipsis isn't really a semantic change. I guess that I should just post in .l10n and ask localizers to fix it, and maybe do a grep '...' at one point and file bugs.

Comment 4

[Simon Paquet [:sipaq]]

Scott, as Phil has already mentioned the Firefox and a Core bug, I will only add the Calendar equivalent (bug 389303). Looking through Firefox code, the ellipsis character is used inconsistently.

As Pike said, this isn't really a semantic change and localizers had the liberty for changing by themselves in the past already. Some locales, where the phrases are normally longer than the English original have probably already done so in the past.

BTW since bug 390282 has also landed on the branch, I can provide you with a branch patch if you want me too as well.

Comment 5

[Scott MacGregor]

Simon, when I look at this patch, I see '?' characters instead of the ellipsis character. But the calendar patches show the ellipsis correctly. 

Comment 6

[Cédric Corazza]

Scott,
Same here. The patch is encoded in ISO-8859-1 or ISO-8859-15 instead of UTF-8

Comment 7

[Scott MacGregor]

Comment on attachment 279328 [details] [diff] [review]
Patch for .dtd and .properties files

canceling the review request. I think someone else just posted a patch in another bug that does the same thing but I actually see the ... character instead of the ? character in the patch.