Re: [libreoffice-l10n] [ANNOUNCE] added possessive genitive case month names, HEADS UP localizers ; -)

Hi Harri,

On Tuesday, 2011-11-22 18:00:00 +0200, Harri Pitkänen wrote:

> On Monday 21 November 2011, Eike Rathke wrote:
> > On Sunday, 2011-11-20 14:30:23 +0200, Harri Pitkänen wrote:
> > > Has
> > > anyone checked how this affects interoperability with Excel?
> >
> > I think they use a similar approach for genitive case names (use them if
> > a day of month is present), but I haven't heard of partitive case.

Hmm.. maybe that was wishful thinking, I didn't find any reference on
that. Vista seems to have genitive month names, but Excel?

> It seems that things are a little bit complicated with Finnish Excel. 
> Essentially it does not have this feature directly in the date format 
> implementation but instead they have hardcoded the partitive suffix into those 
> predefined date formats that need it.

Similar to what was done in our locale data format codes for some
locales. Which reminds me that needs some handling when loading
documents that use such formats.

> It seems to me that the intelligent month name format would lead to doubled 
> partitive suffixes when a document created in Excel is opened in LibreOffice. 

Right, also for documents of an older LibO version if they have hard
coded suffixes.

> We could avoid that by modifying the rule a bit: in case format specifier MMMM 
> (or KKKK in the Finnish example above) is immediately followed by a character 
> literal, nominative form is used even if there is day of month present in the 
> format. This would also avoid problems with older OpenDocument files where 
> people may have used similar hardcoded suffixes.

Good approach, I'll implement that.

> Even then users who take advantage of the new feature in LibreOffice will see 
> the month names incorrectly if they open the file in Excel. I don't see this 
> as a problem since no data is lost, the formatting problem is minor and it is 
> really just a missing feature in Excel which we cannot fix anyway.

The same of course applies when opening such a document in an older LibO
release, only the nominative name would be displayed, unless the locale
defined genitive names in place of nominative names, which some locales
did as it suited better the common use in date formats.

  Eike

-- 
LibreOffice Calc developer. Number formatter stricken i18n transpositionizer.
GnuPG key 0x293C05FD : 997A 4C60 CE41 0149 0DB3  9E96 2F1A D073 293C 05FD

-- 
Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to l10n+help@global.libreoffice.org
Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/
Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette
List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/l10n/
All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted