Why not translating pangram?
My dear fellows,
Probably you're familiar with the famous phrase 'The quick brown fox
jumps over the lazy dog'. As a pangram[1] it seems to be a standard
typeface sample in any font viewer or configuration tool on any OS or
DE. I'm fine with its popularity. What always confuses me is that it
always remains the English form, never localized. I searched online,
but the seemingly all-known Internet failed to provide an reasonable
answer. Until recently I pick up the localization of fonts-tweak-tool,
which is a new font configuration tool formally introduced in coming
Fedora 18[2], this question haunted in my mind so hard that I have to
ask here.
Since the main purpose of pangram in font viewer is about the
typefaces of characters, it wouldn't be much useful if literally
translating 'quick brown fox' into another language. The ideal way I
can think is to find a pangram native to the target language. For
example, if I were using gnome-font-viewer to open a Chinese font(it
seems that the metadata of a font can tell what language this font is
intended for, but I'm not 100% sure), my concern is on how this font
looks on Chinese characters. The 'quick brown fox' only showing 26
alphabetical English characters just won't do. A Chinese pangram, if
exists, will provide more in this case. However, in practice, there's
a need to know how the 26 English alphabets look even in a non-English
font. So displaying the English and the localized pangrams side by
side would be more suitable.
All right. To put it simple, do you think it would be more helpful if:
a). for English font, display the "quick brown fox" pangram as sample.
b). for non-English font, display the "quick brown fox" AND the
pangram native to the language specified by the font metadata as
samples.
Obviously it requires both effort from developers and translators to
make it happen. I'm not sure if there's any technical difficulty in
fonts-tweak-tool thus CCed the main developer Akira. Also I'm writing
to you the translators of Fedora Project to seek your opinions and
expertise.
PS: There are quite a number of pangrams in numerous languages listed
on Wikipedia[3].
Regards,
Tommy He
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangram
[2]https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/18/html/Release_Notes/sect-...
[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pangrams
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