Let’s do a quick walkthrough of several Pontoon improvements that landed over the course of the last month or so.
Abiding maximum string length. If string length limit is provided, Pontoon will now detect it and prevent translations exceeding the limit from being submitted. Additionally, when translating such strings (e.g. snippets or tweets), you’ll notice a countdown which will tell you how many characters do you have left.
Appending “Mahna Mahna” makes this string too long
More information on dashboards. Additional information has been added to project dashboards, namely contact person and links to external resources like development sites, screenshots, etc. Note that links to external resources also appear on the localization dashboards, where they are localized – if you click on the Screenshots link, it will take you to the localized screenshots page.
FTL. We made the first step in bringing FTL powers to translators who aren’t coders. The FTL-specific user interface introduced last year (at the time known as L20n) is now implemented and already in use by the Test Pilot Website. We’ll prepare a more detailed presentation after we land additional improvements in the next weeks.
RTL. A few improvements have been made to make translating into right-to-left scripts more comfortable, particularly by using the correct text alignment and setting the dir attribute explicitly instead of relying on dir=auto.
Relatedly, but not entirely limited to RTL scripts, we landed additional font enhancements:
- The font size for Arabic script is now increased by 20% for better readability. The default Arabic system fonts seem to be relatively small compared to fonts used for Latin and other scripts.
- Italic font style is only used for scripts supported by Open Sans (bug 1357945) to avoid faux italic.
- Марко Костић contributed his first Pontoon patch by fixing bug 1353135, which uses Ubuntu Regular for Serbian and Macedonian Cyrillic italic, because Open Sans only supports Russian Cyrillic in italic type.
Search speedup. Jotes made searching for strings faster and differentiate between Turkish dotted and dotless “i”. To land the search optimization, we had to take Pontoon off for a few minutes. So we created exciting new maintenance mode page featuring… Tetris!
While in maintenance mode, Pontoon will not make you particularly productive
Latest activity enhancements. The latest activity information for project, team, localization and translated resource is now also set if translations are submitted in bulk or through file uploads. We also display latest activity information for subpages. And, jotes made sorting order of the latest activity and deadline column easier to comprehend.
Improving Machinery. Until recently, submissions made through mass actions haven’t been recorded in Translation Memory. This is no longer the case. Additionally, original strings in translation memory and other Machinery suggestions now show diff against the currently translated soruce string.
Translation Memory diff
Making Pontoon more interconnected. Thanks to jotes, resource paths displayed below the original string now link to the translate view of that resource. Similarly, translations in the Locales tab now link to the translate view of the current string in the selected locale, so you can for example quickly suggest fixes for translations.
A few bugs have been fixed:
- Stoyan fixed a JS error occurring when localStorage in unavailable.
- Notification bar has been moved to bottom to avoid covering the most useful features.
- If diff contains whitespace, it is now displayed.
- Bug 1362929: Contributor timeline doesn’t stop loading prematurely (by jotes)
- Bug 1350695: Make submit button execute the action the label indicates (by jotes)
- Bug 1352744: Can’t initialize Pontoon’s db by running migrations via manage.py (by jotes)
- Bug 1354812: Do not copy from helpers on Ctrl + Tab
- Bug 1355850: Check unsaved changes when entering batch editing
- Bug 1363320: Properly compose tab URLs
- Bug 1357425: Upgrade Pontoon to latest Mercurial
- Bug 1351821: More text contrast in textarea
Get involved. A total of 30 bugs have been resolved fixed to support Pontoon improvements covered in this blog post. More than half of them have been fixed or reported by a Mozilla community member. And you can do that, too!
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