[libvoikko] New icons for libreoffice-voikko

[Harri Pitkänen]

On Thursday 17 November 2011, Sjur Moshagen wrote:
> I do recognise the visual power of a graphic as opposed to a textual label,
> and I have no good alternative to suggest. But I still would like to
> discuss how to deal with things like:
> 
> * what should an icon for North, Lule and South Sámi look like? With a Sámi
> flagg-like fill, and then the language code letters in the lower right
> corner? Something else? * what would you do with a language for a
> community without a flag? (perhaphs those languages are not candidates for
> voikko (+hfst) implementations, and thus can be kept outside this
> discussion) * how do you design an icon for, let's say, German? Three
> countries have German as the main language, and then some with German as a
> minority language * if there came to be a Sweden-Finnish speller (or, say,
> a Meänkieli speller), how would the icon for it be different from this new
> icon? Would it need to be?

I would say that as soon as HFST backend of libvoikko is no longer 
experimental we should drop language specific graphics completely and ship 
libreoffice-voikko with just the generic icon. As far as I know this state 
could be reached in a few weeks if someone just had the time to finish the 
last remaining bits.

If someone then takes the code and builds an extension that is limited to 
single language they can (of course they don't need to) change the icon to 
something else.

Right now the situation is that we have products that include support just for 
Finnish and we have experimental products that support some other language 
(and nothing else). In this situation it seems sensible to communicate this to 
the end user through the use of some extra symbol in the icon. I agree that 
this is not a good thing to do in general. We had the Finnish flag in our 
previous icon and thus I think we can keep it for now (it is already much less 
visible in the new version).

For Sámi languages I like the idea of Sámi flag + language code. For 
Greenlandic there is the flag of Greenland that seems appropriate to use. 
Hopefully we will never need to ship language specific extensions for other 
languages.

Harri