Mailing List Archive

issues with Unicode characters in UI dialogues (at least on Windows)
(message resent with links to snapshots instead of attached snapshots; the list rejected my previous message due to "Message body is too big: 97216 bytes with a limit of 60 KB"; hmm: 94 KiB too big in year 2022 ? this reminds me of the BBS era...)

There are two type of Unicode issues related to some UI dialogues - at least on Windows (in my case version 10, 64bit).

1. Pure Unicode characters that are not present in 8-bit Windows codepage

With reference to the snapshot
https://www.secarica.ro/traduceri/misc/01_pinentry-qt_prompt_from_claws-mail_ro.png
the translation for "Cancel" button contains the ? character (U+021B) that is not part of any 8-bit Windows codepage (let alone the current one) and because of that it displays a ? instead, which is common for 8-bit only (i.e. ancient) programs; more than that, as seen in the snapshot
https://www.secarica.ro/traduceri/misc/02_pinentry-qt_prompt_from_claws-mail_ro_retry.png
this happens also with the translated string "Bad Passphrase", which I guess it comes from the combination of these two strings:

#: agent/call-pinentry.c:1566 agent/call-pinentry.c:1830
msgid "SETERROR %s (try %d of %d)"
msgstr "SETERROR %s (încercarea %d din %d)"

#: agent/call-pinentry.c:1622 agent/call-pinentry.c:1885
msgid "Bad Passphrase"
msgstr "Fraz?-parol? gre?it?"

To be noted that the rest of the strings in that dialog *are* correct, despite the presence of the same ? character elsewhere ("Introduce?i fraza-parol? etc.")

These dialogues are related to Claws Mail, but the next ones are related to Mozilla Firefox and an installed extension called Mailvelope.

2. Mess with UTF-8 characters

With reference to the snapshot
https://www.secarica.ro/traduceri/misc/03_pinentry-qt_prompt_from_ff_ro_utf-u_error.png
the translation of the main text is screwed at every UTF-8 character; at the same time, in the snapshot
https://www.secarica.ro/traduceri/misc/04_pinentry-qt_prompt_from_ff_ro_utf-u_error_retry.png
it can be observed a mix of problem from 1. (i.e. just out-of-8-bit-codepage issue on the red string) combined with this UTF-8 mess.

*To be noted here the translated string that says "Not?: cerere de la browserul web."*

This sting is this one:

#: agent/command.c:823
msgid "Note: Request from the web browser."
msgstr "Not?: cerere de la browserul web."

3. Just about the same dialogues, *except for a single difference*: on the above msgstr string, I eliminated the ? character, thus leaving the "Nota: cerere de la browserul web." string as pure ASCII only; now the UTF-8 mess no longer occur, only the out-of-8-bit-codepage issue remains:
https://www.secarica.ro/traduceri/misc/05_pinentry-qt_prompt_from_ff_ro.png
https://www.secarica.ro/traduceri/misc/06_pinentry-qt_prompt_from_ff_ro_retry.png
That ? character triggers in somehow the UTF-8 mess that follows.

Maybe this issue has something to do with this quite complex sting:

#: g10/passphrase.c:529
msgid ""
"%s\n"
"\"%.*s\"\n"
"%u-bit %s key, ID %s,\n"
"created %s%s.\n"
"%s"
msgstr ""
"%1$s\n"
"„%3$.*2$s”\n"
"cheie %5$s de %4$u de bi?i, ID %6$s,\n"
"creat? în data de %7$s%8$s\n"
"%9$s"

4. Again on Claws Mail, with reference to the snapshot
https://www.secarica.ro/traduceri/misc/07_claws-mail_libgpg-error_utf-8_display_error_1.png
an error string that is passed from libgpg-error is displayed wrong at UTF-8 encoded characters (this particular string is when canceling an attempt to decrypt a message).

The error string comes from here:

#: src/err-codes.h:127
msgid "Operation cancelled"
msgstr "Opera?iune anulat?"

This one has nothing to do with the out-of-8-bit-codepage, since the ? one *is* part of both CP1250 and ISO-8859-2 (while I am sure that the GTK+, on which Claws Mail is based, is, or should be, always Unicode).

??

Cristi

--
Cristian Secar?
https://www.secarica.ro

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Re: issues with Unicode characters in UI dialogues (at least on Windows) [ In reply to ]
On Dienstag, 4. Januar 2022 14:55:52 CET Cristian Secar? wrote:
> (message resent with links to snapshots instead of attached snapshots; the
> list rejected my previous message due to "Message body is too big: 97216
> bytes with a limit of 60 KB"; hmm: 94 KiB too big in year 2022 ? this
> reminds me of the BBS era...)

Don't assume that everybody on this planet has a stable and fast internet
connection.

> There are two type of Unicode issues related to some UI dialogues - at least
> on Windows (in my case version 10, 64bit).

It would help if you told us what version of Gpg4win (?) you are using.

It may also be better to file bug reports on https://dev.gnupg.org because
this makes it much easier to track the different issues. And you can attach
snapshots to the bug reports.

Regards,
Ingo
Re: issues with Unicode characters in UI dialogues (at least on Windows) [ In reply to ]
În data de Tue, 04 Jan 2022 16:29:36 +0100, Ingo Klöcker a scris:

> Don't assume that everybody on this planet has a stable and fast
> internet connection.

On the contrary: in year 2022 I consider safe to assume that a ~100 K e-mail message [1] is trivial for any available internet connection, even when reading the e-mail with, for example, a 12 years old Symbian based Nokia N8 over a 3G mobile network. If someone still uses a 14,4k modem (at best) for its computer, then that is *its* problem, not to the rest of the world – not to mention that speed, in this particular case, is of no importance. 30-35 years ago, a single game on Commodore 64 or Sinclair Spectrum 48k/128k was loaded from audio cassette tape in ~3-5 minutes; not a big deal then, unimaginable by many today.

> It would help if you told us what version of Gpg4win (?) you are
> using.

Gpg4win 4.0.0, installed clean – i.e. no previous Gpg4win installed since last time the I reinstalled the OS.

> It may also be better to file bug reports on https://dev.gnupg.org
> because this makes it much easier to track the different issues. And
> you can attach snapshots to the bug reports.

I would have done that (bug report), but what component to consider for report ? First I observed those popup dialog encoding errors during GPA usage when I worked on its translation [2], only later I observed the same errors when interacting with other 'connected' programs; the title bar of the snapshots in question says "pinentry-qt", however, it seems to me (?) that the translated messages are gtk gettext (not Qt); I also assumed (?) that the error messages are distinct from pinentry itself and I also guess that Gpg4win is just a sort of a wrapper for the suite.

[1] I just made a test: I forwarded my links-only message to a Gmail account, then I saved locally the Gmail page as is: the saved stuff has >10 MiB, so this amount was network traffic for only about 8 KiB of actual information.
[2] https://dev.gnupg.org/T5753

Cristi

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Re: issues with Unicode characters in UI dialogues (at least on Windows) [ In reply to ]
> > Don't assume that everybody on this planet has a stable and fast
> > internet connection.
>
> On the contrary: in year 2022 I consider safe to assume that a ~100 K e-mail message [1] is trivial for any available internet connection, even when reading the e-mail with, for example, a 12 years old Symbian based Nokia N8 over a 3G mobile network. If someone still uses a 14,4k modem (at best) for its computer, then that is *its* problem, not to the rest of the world – not to mention that speed, in this particular case, is of no importance.

Related, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Internet_connection_speeds

In the past Africa and Central America had some of the slowest speeds.
They were still doing dial-up while a lot of places had moved to
broadband.

And take a look where the US is on the list: #25. We can thank the US
Supreme Court for that. The idiots in the black robes declared 2
companies were enough for competition. Contrast that to South Korea,
which has 6 providers veying for a consumer. South Korea is #2 on the
list, and they can download a 3.5 GB image in about 7 seconds. And
South Korean consumers pay about half the price of a US consumer with
a slower connection.

It should be no surprise the US Supreme Court screwed up again. They
are the same asses that brought us Scott v Sandford, and declared
black people were property and had no place in our democracy. That
ruling still stands today; the Court has never fixed it. The Judicial
Branch should be proud of itself.

Jeff

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Re: issues with Unicode characters in UI dialogues (at least on Windows) [ In reply to ]
> And take a look where the US is on the list: #25. We can thank the US
> Supreme Court for that...

Please, let's not turn this mailing list into a free-for-all for
discussing United States government telecommunications policies. That's
wildly off-topic.

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Re: issues with Unicode characters in UI dialogues (at least on Windows) [ In reply to ]
On Tue, 4 Jan 2022 15:55, Cristian Secar? said:
> (message resent with links to snapshots instead of attached snapshots;
> the list rejected my previous message due to "Message body is too big:
> 97216 bytes with a limit of 60 KB"; hmm: 94 KiB too big in year 2022 ?

94 * 3094 = 284 MiB For just one message. That is far away from green
computing. The actually content is only of interest for a very few
subscribers, thus it is unfriendly to tamp their mailboxes. Sending an
URL is better; for example using dev.gnupg.org



Shalom-Salam,

Werner

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Re: issues with Unicode characters in UI dialogues (at least on Windows) [ In reply to ]
Cristian,

thanks for helping GnuPG with the Romanian translation of GPA [2]
and by reporting general issues!

Note that GPA currently is a bit on the slow track, with Werner, its principal
maintainer does not having much time for it. The main development effort
goes into Kleopatra these days and GPA will probably be dropped from the
Gpg4win installer, see

https://lists.wald.intevation.org/pipermail/gpg4win-devel/2021-September/thread.html

But I think your report maybe showing a problem also present in other
components.

Am Dienstag 04 Januar 2022 21:36:41 schrieb Cristian Secar?:
> I would have done that (bug report), but what component to consider for
> report ?

One report should go to the pinentry and pinentry-qt component.
(You can also report without category, if you are unsure, just describing the
observations.)

> First I observed those popup dialog encoding errors during GPA
> usage when I worked on its translation [2], only later I observed the same
> errors when interacting with other 'connected' programs; the title bar of
> the snapshots in question says "pinentry-qt", however, it seems to me (?)
> that the translated messages are gtk gettext (not Qt); I also assumed (?)
> that the error messages are distinct from pinentry itself and I also guess
> that Gpg4win is just a sort of a wrapper for the suite.

Maybe you can do another development step by checking pinentry directly,
e.g. try to call pinentry-qt.exe directly and do something like
OK Pleased to meet you
setcancel äh öh
OK
getpin
help
Control-Z

And see which string may cause an unwanted behaviour and if other pinentry
versions work better. (You then may need to pipe in the commands from a file,
as I do not know what kind of transformations a powershell or command.com may
do.)

Best,
Bernhard

> [2] https://dev.gnupg.org/T5753


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