William Overington
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Posts posted by William Overington
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58 minutes ago, R C-R said:
It isn't.
Well, as I wrote before, I don't know whether Pledge 4 is significantly different from what happened previously or not.
As far as I am aware, there is no information published to customers pursuant to Pledge 4 as to what is the situation over assessment of ideas and feedback about suggested ideas now that Affinity is owned by Canva.
I am hoping that [edited] will explain what assessment process will be used.
The purchase of Affinity by Canva is a big event, so maybe the situation will change, or maybe the idea is to keep everything as it was lest changing anything spoils what has been bought.
William
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6 hours ago, R C-R said:
Pledge 4 has nothing to do with the fact that your suggestion is nothing more than a trivialization of one that has been discussed many times in the past, including the need to make substantial changes in how the UI is implemented to get it to work.
Well, then substantial changes could be made to a copy of the source code to get what I have suggested to work, without in any way altering the basic versions at all. I have not suggested that it could all be done in half an hour.
With innovation I have found that one needs to be willing to try something even if it might appear pointless to do, because it can often unexpectedly lead to something good. Many people try to extrapolate from the known into the unknown on an opinion without actually testing whether their assumptions are correct.
Pledge 4 is a new beginning. It is not a good idea to grumble away that wonderful opportunity.
6 hours ago, R C-R said:Besides, it should be obvious that Pledge 4 is not significantly different from what Serif was doing before Canva bought it as far as considering user feedback & ideas when deciding what features to implement. But since you posted this to the existing Feedback & Suggestions forum, please consider what it says about searching first before starting a new topic.
Well, I don't know whether Pledge 4 is significantly different from what happened previously. I am hoping that [edited] will say how in the new Canva era ideas will be assessed and whether feedback will be provided by private email to those who have suggested ideas. It does not need to be the old no comment secretive assessment process from times gone by, Affinity could seize the great opportunity of Pledge 4 to go forward splendidly. I hope that the opportunity is not grumbled away.
William
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1 hour ago, R C-R said:
BTW, in this respect, for what should be obvious reasons there is no "new era" so your repeating that fatuous catch phrase here is just as meaningless as it was in the other topic.
I am always wary when someone purports obvious reasons without stating what are any of those purportedly obvious reasons that are purported to exist.
Pledge 4 has been issued as a result of discussions involving Canva, so it is a new era for Affinity as Canva were not, as far as I am aware, previously involved in the management of Affinity activity.
William
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10 hours ago, Pšenda said:
Maybe because it's been requested many times already, and Serif has commented on it many times. If I remember correctly, Serif bears full responsibility for its applications, and therefore also for the correctness of the translations. It is not Open source, Shareware or Freeware for users to do at home.
P.S. Translation using external tables is suitable at most for menu items, where the variable/different length of words with the same meaning does not matter so much, but it is not suitable for UI, where it can cause complete disintegration and illegibility of forms and panels.
As regards the User Interface, whether my suggestion is suitable will depend upon how it is done.
A paragraph of text over several lines can be divided into several single lines. Setting up of the localization file always has a human input, this is not a machine translation scenario.
William
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The aflist.dat file could be encrypted such that it would not load if the encryption of a passcode were not correct. So Affinity could have provenance that only an official Affinity aflist.dat file would work.
What Serif may have said in the past is gone. Canva are the new owners with Affinity now having more money to invest in moving forward and if they made this idea work they could perhaps get good publicity for Affinity products as being go ahead and futuristic.
Look to the future, not be shackled by the past.
William
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@R C-R The purpose is so that versions of Affinity software programs could become available with menus in any one of many languages. Once the localizable version is set up, producing a version in another language would be by getting a copy of the English version aflist.dat file translated and localized into that other language. So there could be a version of each Affinity program in each of hundreds of languages. With a default menu item in English if a translation for a particular menu term is not available.
William
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4 hours ago, walt.farrell said:
If you want that, make a Feature Request, or add on to an existing one with information on how it would benefit your work.
Mentioning it here will have no effect on the development of the programs.
I have followed your advice.
William
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A suggestion for there being a localizable version of each of the Affinity programs such that the localization of the menus is using an external localization file.
This would be a substantial task to implement, but could potentially have substantial benefits.
In an Affinity program there are menus, for example with words in English.
My suggestion is that each string literal, such as File is replaced in the localizable version of that Affinity program by an element of a string variable array.
It is important that the string array can handle Unicode characters so as to provide for the greatest possible number of localized versions being possible, please ensure that 8-bit characters are NOT used. Please do NOT use UTF-8, please use UTF-16.
Bearing in mind that I have not programmed for many years, this may not be expressed in the source code of the programming language that is being used for Affinity programs, but hopefully my meaning will get through to your programmers.
Suppose that the string literal "File" is replaced by an element of a string array, say, afmenu[1] and that afmenu[1] has a default value of "File".
At start up the program looks for a UTF-16 text file aflist.dat and, if it finds such a file, populates the afmenu array as much as it can from the aflist.dat file. Thus the afmenu array has text in each of its elements, none, some, or all of the afmenu items having text in English and the rest of the afmenu items having the text in the language of the particular aflist.dat file that was used. So for example, there could be an aflist.dat file in Estonian, an aflist.dat file in Welsh, and so on, and the end user could choose which aflist.dat file to use. There are commercial translation facilities that could translate and localize a copy of the English aflist.dat file into another language.
The aflist.dat file could use the same format as the sentence.dat file specified in a document available from my webspace.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/localizable_sentences_research.htm
The file is as follows.
There are issues that a font with glyphs for the characters used in the language into which localization is made will be needed and there will be issues for the rendering of some languages.
This would be a quite large project to implement but the potential benefits of implementation could also be large too.
William J. G. Overington
Tuesday 16 April 2024
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39 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:
If you want that, make a Feature Request, or add on to an existing one with information on how it would benefit your work.
Mentioning it here will have no effect on the development of the programs.
Oh I don't need it as my language is English. But I would love to see it done.
William
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20 minutes ago, R C-R said:
What do you think that or anything else in your last post has to do with Canva? Why are you cluttering up this topic with drivel like this?
Please try to confine your posts here to things that relate to Canva & its purchase of Affinity!
I was challenged as to why I was asking, so I clarified my situation for the avoidance of doubt.
William
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5 minutes ago, R C-R said:
Can't you understand that there are so many possible as yet unimplemented features that might appeal to workers in many different fields that there is no way to do more than wonder about it, with no hope of getting anything like a comprehensive or definitive answer?
IOW, pick a new feature, any feature you can think of, & some people, if they bother to reply at all, are going to tell you that yes, in their opinion there will be people who start using Affinity if it is implemented.
Alright, a localizable version of each of the Affinity programs such that the localization of the menus is using an external localization file.
William
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33 minutes ago, wonderings said:
Sounds like you are trying to do Canva's work for them. Again this is a deep dive into something that would basically gather up a huge portion of the forum and put it in once place, ie what features are missing or desired in Affinity. You are trying to add specifics as in what industries use these. Not sure why you as an individual need to know this. If it is a feature you would like I would think the best thing for you to do is request it in the proper forum. I am sure a company with a $40 billion evaluation can handle these questions internally and have creative professionals on staff who know all about the features they have and don't have. There is also no indication on what sort of cash flow will be funnelled into Affinity development.
I am retired, at home, just participating in a discussion.
After posting this I am going to try to do my daily learning of Welsh on Duolingo.com to try to get some more quests towards the 50 needed to get this month's badge.
Then perhaps have a look at the following thread.
Chicken sculptures (Page 1) — Art & Literature — Alfred's Serif Users' Forums (punster.me)
William
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9 minutes ago, R C-R said:
Obviously I hope, the answer is yes, so I cannot understand why are you even bothered to ask about it.
Because I am wondering what are those roles and what features would appeal to them.
William
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19 minutes ago, wonderings said:
And again, what does this have to do with the acquisition of Affinity by Canva? You are delving deeper into something that would warrant its own thread. The market is pretty clear, if you need to work with vector files then Designer is for you, if you are needing page layout then Publisher is for you, if you are editing photos, then Photos is for you. The question seems so convoluted.
As I understand the situation, due to lots of funding becoming available, Affinity can now become developed further and more rapidly than before.
Are there roles where people currently do not use Affinity products because Affinity products do not do what those people need and who might start to use Affinity products if Affinity products were to add some particular facility to what they do?
For example, unless things have changed recently, Affinity products do not have built-in colour font capability. What employment roles need colour font capability? Would adding colour font capability to Affinity products increase sales to an extent to make the cost of adding colour font capability worth spending?
Or is adding colour font capability something that will be added anyway because not having it looks unfortunate?
That is just one example.
19 minutes ago, wonderings said:Are you working in the marketing department for Canva?
No. I am retired, I am not connected to Canva, my only connection to Serif and Affinity is as a customer.
William
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No need to remove it.
This thread has a range of views and opinions, short posts, long posts.
William
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On 4/14/2024 at 11:34 AM, Alfred said:
Happy Talk! 🎶
“You've got to have a dream,
If you don't have a dream
How you gonna have a dream come true?”
On 4/14/2024 at 11:39 AM, PaulEC said:Tilting at windmills? "To dream, the impossible dream..." 😉
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@Alfred Because reading the sequence of posts in the other thread explains the backstory of why I started this thread.
You and I are both following this thread, so hopefully we can observe whether it is unused for its intended purpose or whether it is a stepping stone that results in the starting by Affinity management of the new additional forum that @Aurea Ratio wants.
There are 131 views thus far, including ours, and thus far no response apart from yours. Yet maybe given time that will change, though maybe not.
William
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I refer to the following post.
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/201423-canva/&do=findComment&comment=1202348
There is a sequence of a few posts regarding this, then this post.
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/201423-canva/&do=findComment&comment=1202480
So here is the thread.
Although I use Affinity products for work that I consider serious, I am basically a hobbyist user of Affinity products.
So I am not intending to participate in this thread, I have simply set it up in the hope that it might be of interest to some users. Though I hope to watch with interest.
If people wish to criticise me for starting this thread, please start your own thread to do that and not disrupt this thread from its intended purpose.
William
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7 minutes ago, Aurea Ratio said:
Can't you see the absurdity in a serious thread surrounded by the usual?
No. If you start the thread that I suggested in this forum then there is the possibility that you might as a result get the forum that you want.
Something I read long ago was "Never grumble away your opportunities."
You have deemed my suggestion as absurd.
Alright, I will try it and see what happens.
William
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Well, it could be tried and see what happens.
William
A localizable version of each of the Affinity programs such that the localization of the menus is using an external localization file
in Feedback for the Affinity V2 Suite of Products
Posted
Well yes, but ideas are being sought and I have suggested one. If my idea could be got working there could be versions of Affinity programs in hundreds of languages. The incremental cost of each additional language being relatively low.
William