I signed up not that long ago and should introduce myself. I’m Claudine! I don’t sew or design professionally, just for myself and sometimes for my friends. I was introduced to CAD back in the stone age when I earned a certificate in AutoCAD, which I never used for anything until I took a few pattern drafting classes through the design school at my local junior college. The classes were taught old school pencil-and-paper, but it wasn’t hard to translate the principles to AutoCAD. I don’t have access to AutoCAD anymore and some time ago went back to pencil-and-paper drafting, which slowed me down to the point where I kind of stopped sewing anything. So, I am beyond excited to have come across Seamly! Since installing the software a few weeks ago I’ve been drawing all the things! I’ve been pulling all my reference books of the shelf to see what else I can draw! I just can’t stop!!!
I’m so stoked, in fact, that I want to contribute to this project. A long time ago I coded professionally, but about a dozen years ago I did a career switch, so coding is not what I do day-to-day anymore. Which all is to say that ya’ll probably don’t want me touching any code, at least not any time soon. So how else can I help? Docs? Testing? Any niggly things that just need one person’s dedicated attention? I make no promises, I have about as much free time as the next person (and I’ve been using it to draw stuff in Seamly!) but if ya’ll want to throw something my way I’ll be happy to gnaw on it until it’s done!
I’m so happy that you’re enjoying drafting with Seamly as I am. I’m another one that just can’t stop.
We’re always happy to get help.
What we need is a new manual in PDF describing how to use the software and the tools, a step-by-step from measurements to print-out of a small pattern, and a video to accompany it. The Wiki has been updated recently so it can be used in the PDF. If that sounds like a task you would like to do, we’ll only be grateful, because it really does need doing.
If you are fluent in any other languages besides English, we also always need help with the translations.
I’m incompetent in several languages besides English.
User manual! I can do that! I can start a thread to solicit input and feedback? I couldn’t find an existing one, at least not quickly.
Can I also maybe organize the issues list in github? I ask because I was looking through it to see what bugs have already been reported and what features have been requested, and categorizing/tagging of the issues hasn’t been uniform, so sorting wasn’t super straightforward. I can propose something before going at it.
Yes, you may start a new thread, it’ll probably be best.
I couldn’t say… Perhaps @Douglas can reply to that, but most of the issues have been dealt with and closed. The ones that are open are ongoing and not yet complete or still in the “thought & planning” stage. Personally, I stay as far away from that as I can
Hello! I can help with translation to portuguese, I am brasilian and I have a bad english in writing, but my reading is much better, so, maybe I can help…
That will be totally amazing. Translations are always needed as the program gets updated and improved constantly. The best way to go about the translations is to install the software QTLinguist, download the Seamly source code and to do the translations in QTLinguist, and then to send the file to @Douglas to check and include in one of the weekly updates.
Using QTLinguist will help to add translations to the whole software and not just the measurement files and, once it’s setup, you’ll find that it’s really easy to use and it actually flags text that needs to be translated due to changes in software.
Oops! There’s a little problem that I couldn’t preview!
My computer is an Endless OS system, a soft version of Linux, and unfortunally the GitHub link, doesn’t offer a Qt Linguist version for this operational system…
Would be another option for Endless OS?
If we can’t find a Linux version of Linguist you can always edit a *.ts file in a text editor. A .ts file is just an xml text file for traslations. You just have to be more careful while editing as ending punctuation and whitespace is important, If it doesn’t match the translation tests will fail and thus the build will fail.
As an example this is what the seamly2d_pt_BR.ts file looks like:
Where each “message” or text to translate has a source in English, and the translation in Portugese. If there is no translation, and it’s also marked as type=“unfinished”, where the English source text is used.
In the case where there is a translation, but it’s marked unfinished, it means someone tramslated it, but it wasn’t checked as being accurate. Such as:
I guessing that “Nome” is correct, in which case type=“unfinshed” can removed. Liguist automatically handles this by clicking the “Check” button to mark as done.
I have finally figured out how to auto translate a whole TS file. I was able to translate the Portuguese seamly2d_pt_BR.ts file. So what this means @C.A_PELLA is you won’t have to translate the ts file(s), but what you can do is check and verify that the translations are accurate.
Yes… we should be abe to translate any language 100% with ease - of course with varying accuracy and quirks. IMO better than no tanslation.
I found an app that extracts all the source texts to a *.txt, which I had to convert to a *.docx file that Google could translate… then I could download the translated *.docx file, convert that back to a *.txt file, which the app could then combine with the orginal *.txt to a combined pair *.txt file, which the app can then use to update the original *.ts file. Whew. All after I had to figure out a few quirks of the app… like the original and translated text files have to match in number of lines, and Google seemed to strick extra CR’s in source texts that were multi line. Also somewhere in the process some accented chars got replaced by a strange char code… which I thought was just the “ã”, but was also the “ç”, so when I just replaced all with “ã” I eneded up with a lot of “ãã” when it should have been “çã”. So I spent most of the time fixing those.
I also found a couple other apps to help… one will split a *ts file into just the “unfinished” source texts… which can be translated seperately, Another can merge *ts files… so this way any current translated texts are not affected.
BTW… there are 2604 seperate source texts that get translated in the Seamly2D app. Yikes! That’s why it’s quite a task to manually translate a *.ts file. Now we can do it in less than an hour - give or take.
That was another hiccup I ran into. The app instructions said to upload the outputted txt file, but Google wanted a docx file. Since I had to build the app anyway as there were no binary releases, I may figure out how to have it write the output as a docx and eliminate a step. What I found ironic with the app being a Qt translation utility - it’s not translated.
So how else can I help? Docs? Testing? Any niggly things that just need one person’s dedicated attention? I make no promises, I have about as much free time as the next person (and I’ve been using it to draw stuff in Seamly!) but if ya’ll want to throw something my way I’ll be happy to gnaw on it until it’s done!
Since I had to build the app anyway as there were no binary releases, I may figure out how to have it write the output as a docx and eliminate a step. What I found ironic with the app being a Qt translation utility - it’s not translated. 