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Oops, that was meant to go out to Rob,
Tari, and Steve only, but I guess everyone is welcome to play along. Sorry ‘bout that. Ken -----Original Message----- Okay
boys and girls, here is a first cut at multi-language paper ballots. Never let it be said that I didn’t
deliver this by the end of August :-).
The release is 1.18.13.2. I
haven’t actually done the code to print all artwork to file, but you can
view, proof, and print ballots in the ballot/card editor window. There is a new combo-box in the editor
so you can select which language you are viewing for the current card. The
ballot editor will allow you to see if the secondary languages are squishing
unreasonably. If they are, then
tweak your English
and regenerate to make more space.
Please let me know right away if this process becomes
time-consuming. I can without too
much effort change the algorithm to generate for the worst-case language instead
of the default language, but I am worried about killing ballot generation
performance. I would rather add a
check box to the language dialog to allow the user to define which language to
generate for, but I can’t do that in 1.18 because there is no place to
save the choice in the current database schema. Doing
the “print artwork” stuff will only take a few hours to do, but I
wanted to get something in your hands now.
If I broke something, I will have broken it in this release. As should go without saying, please be
extra-careful with your proofing.
If one or all of you can volunteer your real databases to play with, it
would be appreciated. I am going to
ask Ravina to do some testing as well.
So far I have only played with trivial toy databases when doing
development on this. Ken -----Original Message----- From: owner-support@gesn.com
[mailto:owner-support@gesn.com] On Behalf Of Steve Knecht If languages will take different
spacing, will it be up to a human sitting at a terminal to match the spacing
from ballot to ballot? Or will
there be some automated help from GEMS in
showing which races are not lining up.
I guess I'm making an assumption that
oval positions across ballots will be required to be the same. Maybe I'm wrong here. For this iteration at least, the
ballot positions will match. That
means that we can re-use the card numbers.
The AccuVote-OS is none the wiser that there are multiple languages. GEMS will lay out the ballot for the
default language. That is,
English. Other languages will be
laid out in the same space as the English.
If the other languages do not fit, they will be squished. This might mean using a slightly larger
font for English, or adding some extra hard returns at the end of long
referenda if the squishing gets out of hand. Note that this will just be a per-race
exercise, not a per-ballot exercise.
If this proves too cumbersome I can probably write some code to lay out
for the worst-case language rather than the default language, but my best guess
is that it won’t come to that. If they do need to be the same, and
there are thousands of styles, like in King or GEMS? Perhaps
GEMS could play motivational phrases on the speakers from time to time. From: owner-support@gesn.com
[mailto:owner-support@gesn.com] On Behalf Of Steve Knecht The language name will be in the
file name. Probably
English-10-10F.pdf, or somesuch. Ken |