Sunday, February 12, 2012

German labelings of birthdays in KOrganizer

In Kontact/KOrganizer it is possible to view automatically generated birthdays (generated from the addressbook) in your calendar. The generated title of the event is "Geburtstag von %name". In the month view there is not enough space to display the whole title. The result is that in every birthday I can only read "Geburtstag" and not the person who has her/his birthday.


 I can see that it is a birthday due to the candle-symbol (yes, that is not a battery symbol) and the colour of the item (calendar colour). (I think the english version is "%name's birthday" where "birthday" is cut away when the text is too long.)

So I filed a bugreport but it seems to be more difficult to get a real good solution for that. However the text is changed (thank you Frederik) in the next version.

I didn't want to wait that long and Burkhard was so kind to give me a howto so I could change it on my local machine. I want to share that with anyone who wants to change that, too (it seems to be a problem in other languages as well). This howto is for openSUSE but you should change that easily to your distro of choise.

0) install package gettext-tools

1) msgunfmt /usr/share/locale/de/LC_MESSAGES/akonadi_birthdays_resource.mo >/tmp/akonadi_birthdays_resource.po

2) edit /tmp/akonadi_birthdays_resource.po

Change "Geburtstag von %1" to "%1 (Geburtstag)"

[shortcuts: i = edit   esc = exit edit   :wq = save and exit] or use "kwrite" instead of "edit"

3) sudo msgfmt /tmp/akonadi_birthdays_resource.po -o /usr/share/locale/de/LC_MESSAGES /akonadi_birthdays_resource.mo

It takes a view minutes until the titles will be changed.

4 comments:

sergio said...

I never thought that was a candle!

Thomas Thym (ungethym) said...

What is/was your suggestion?

sergio said...

None, just never realized what the icon meant

Lukas said...

It would be interesting to see how it would look like if the birthdays would be treated differently than all other events:

Put them at the bottom of the cell without any border/box surrounding. Just simple and single monochrome icon like http://bit.ly/xQ52Y1 on the left with 80-90% black text.

Dropping borders leaves more space, thus it could fit like 3-4 shortened (like Thomas T., or Lukas D.) names in just 2 lines - if you don't know the person by short form, I doubt you are going to greet him anyway.

If there are more names, than could fit in 2 lines (space is expensive after all) just show +2 or 2 more.

Clicking a name could open email/IM/FB/whatever editor to make sending greetings care easy.


Birthdays are quite unique events - always single day, full day events, you don't change date of a them, appears only once a year and has a different meaning for the user (you're probably not attending all those 278 birthdays of all your "friends" (especially if sync with facebook etc)).