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Comment by Telaneo

15 hours ago

This works poorly if you intend to localise your application. Great if you don't though.

(Speaking of menu/drop-downs with underlined characters for alt commands.)

> This works poorly if you intend to localise your application. Great if you don't though.

Sure that's true. But remember M$ allowed you to fairly easily edit those underlined-characters in, oh, for example Office 2002 and 2003. Even if you didn't have a lot of default underlines in your current language settings, it is still possible for someone to add their own underline-shortcuts.

Back in those days, the first thing I did on any personal new install of Outlook, was to disable the shortcut that marked all email as being read. (That's cause I hit that button by accident too many times.)

  • > Sure that's true. But remember M$ allowed you to fairly easily edit those underlined-characters in, oh, for example Office 2002 and 2003. Even if you didn't have a lot of default underlines in your current language settings, it is still possible for someone to add their own underline-shortcuts.

    That's a feature that was hidden from me at least, but honestly, this is a good-ish solution to that problem.

    I remember Office having the underlines, but they were inconsistent between the original English and my localised version (and I used both depending on the machine), which made them useless. That wasn't that big of an issue when all the normal keyboard shortcuts are also written out, but it would have been even less of a problem if I knew how to edit them.

It sounds like your complaint might be that it works poorly if you half-ass the localization process and assume that literal translation of strings is most or all of what localization means.

  • I'm not sure how you read that from my comment.

    To be fair to your point though, that's what most localisation of programs are these days.