Ted Gould:

I don't know what you schedule looks like, but we're probably going to have a release in the next week or two, so if you hurry we could probably get a few into this release.

Bryce Harrington:

Yes, that'd be a great addition. Translation of the tutorials should be straightforward, but please ask questions if you run into any trouble.

Thanks for the welcome. I doubt that I can be *that* fast, though. Especially as I keep running into a strange problem I haven't yet found a solution for (and it appears not to be in the list of known bugs either).

I have started out by taking the basic tutorial, copying it, and replacing the English paragraphs one at a time with German ones. In order to keep the formatting (bold face for keys to be pressed) I have tried to write my text around the bold parts so I could simply re-use them, but in some cases I have had to do that formatting myself in the XML editor, and that's my first encounter with direct XML formatting ever (there's a really loud and pleading, almost whining FEATURE REQUEST coming up here: decent text formatting!).

Anyway, here's the problem: maybe I have done something wrong during my dabbling with the editor, but now whenever I write or delete something in those paragraphs, the amount of used RAM is stepped up by as much as 2 MB per keystroke. Add a letter, +2MB. Delete it again, +2 MB. That goes un until most free RAM is used (some 205 MB of 218 MB free RAM), then the same goes on in swap, 2 MB at a time, until both RAM and swap are full. After which the hard disk unsurprisingly begins to work like hell, the system becomes unresponsive and after a quarter of an hour or so, during which the system only staggeringly accepts mouse movement and the clock only counts every ten seconds or even more rarely, Inkscape disappears.

I can work around this problem by saving and closing before RAM and swap are full, then closing Inkscape and opening it again. RAM won't be freed unless I close the program. That way I'm unable to edit more than a paragraph, most of the time even less, before I have to restart the program.

I haven't been able to get the same error in a fresh file, even with using the XML editor and entering substantially more text than I've already translated. It doesn't appear in a Tutorial file I start editing anew, at least not immediately (though I haven't tried to get as far as I got with my first file), but it does get inherited if I copy the paragraphs I've already done over into a new file.

If anyone is interested in taking a look at that file I can send out the unfinished translation file by e-mail.

And then there's one other thing I've found out so far: using ` to cycle through zoom views does not work with a German keyboard layout, as you need the Shift key to even get this symbol (the Shift-less symbol on the same key is '). These symbols are used to make accented letters (é, è) unless the so-called 'dead keys' are disabled, but even then it seems you can't use them for cycling through zoom settings; at least I can't.

Robin