Allow using a tag, such as [br], to define line breaks in GUI XML files

[Adrián Chaves]

Currently, to print line breaks in text in the GUI XML files, you need to use them in the XML file itself:

<object>
[font="serif-bold-16"]Alpha XIII: Magadha![/font]

WARNING: This is an early development version of the game. Many features have not been added yet.

Get involved at: play0ad.com
</object>

I would like to be able to do this:

<object>[font="serif-bold-16"]Alpha XIII: Magadha![/font][br][br]WARNING: This is an early development version of the game. Many features have not been added yet.[br][br]Get involved at: play0ad.com</object>

Implementation requires modifying sources/gui/GUItext.h and sources/gui/GUItext.cpp, as far as I can tell.

I want this feature so that I can implement internationalization of this type of text objects in XML like this:

<object>
    <keep>[font="serif-bold-16"]</keep>
    <localize>Alpha XIII: Magadha</localize>
    <keep>[/font][br][br]</keep>
    <localize>WARNING: This is an early development version of the game. Many features have not been added yet.</localize>
    <keep>[br][br]</keep>
    <localize>Get involved at: play0ad.com</localize>
</object>

So that translators can work with that object as the following three strings:

• Alpha XIII: Magadha
• WARNING: This is an early development version of the game. Many features have not been added yet.
• Get involved at: play0ad.com

[Adrián Chaves]

For now, I’m using \n in the XML files to do the same thing, and I use CStr.UnescapeBackslashes() to get it converted to a line break.

[zoot]

Replying to Gallaecio:

I want this feature so that I can implement internationalization of this type of text objects in XML like this:

<object>
    <keep>[font="serif-bold-16"]</keep>
    <localize>Alpha XIII: Magadha</localize>
    <keep>[/font][br][br]</keep>
    <localize>WARNING: This is an early development version of the game. Many features have not been added yet.</localize>
    <keep>[br][br]</keep>
    <localize>Get involved at: play0ad.com</localize>
</object>

No offense, but this seems very convoluted to me. Does any other internationalization system use such a level of complexity? What is wrong with translating the whole string at once?

[Adrián Chaves]

Ok, I can do so. Still, I think [br] would be a nice addition, and one that wouldn’t require much effort to someone that has worked on that part of the code before.

[Adrián Chaves]

This is “fixed” in the internationalization branch (#67), just using “\n” instead of “[br]”.