Multi-language comic without scripts

JexKerome · Post by **JexKerome** » Sat May 01, 2004 2:24 am

I planned for my comic to be available in two languages (english and spanish) since Day One, but then noticed Kisai doesn't want to deal with PHPs or CGIs on our sites. What other options do I have, apart from making doubles of everything, once in each language?

Joel Fagin · Post by **Joel Fagin** » Sat May 01, 2004 3:18 am

Two Keenspace accounts is all I can think of.

- Joel Fagin

Cheebs · Post by **Cheebs** » Sat May 01, 2004 6:32 am

You could have a separate, non-automatically updating archive for the other language comics on the same site and just keep up with the site updates. It'll mean uploading a lot of HTML pages, but if you have a template, it'd be only a matter of changing the image number in the image tag and saving.

Faub · Post by **Faub** » Sat May 01, 2004 4:28 pm

This is totally going to depend on how Apache is setup, but multi-lingual support should already be built in. The idea was to make multiple copies of your web pages and save them with a language extension:

index.html.en = English
index.html.es = Espanol
index.html.de = Deutch
etc.

Same goes for the rest of the pages.

Now, here's the problem. Autokeen won't do this for you as far as I know. It appears to general index.html only, ignoring the language extension. You would need to manage the site updates yourself. (This means including the ad text on every page. No program to update it for you. Two comics per update. Two HTML pages per update.) It's just a website. You don't need to use Autokeen. It's there for convenience.

JexKerome · Post by **JexKerome** » Sat May 01, 2004 9:04 pm

Thing is, I really wanted to avoid that. My brother has this cool script that adds the dialogue text and word balloons to an existing image. So I could use the same image, and just change the text. This would result in less work and space consumption than actually having, in effect, two pages in the same site. The problem is that it's PHP, and PHP is a no no. I was hoping someone else had found a way around this problem, considering the sheer number of spacers out there, but...

I already had a bilingual site once, so I know the work involved. Ah well, since it seems I may have to reestructure the whole site anyway to the lower 800x600 resolution, I may just do this...

Or I might just forget the whole thing and be English only.

Faub · Post by **Faub** » Sat May 01, 2004 9:43 pm

Another method would be to have two images, one for the comic and one for the text (transparent). You would use javascript and CSS to position the text over the comic.

JexKerome · Post by **JexKerome** » Sun May 02, 2004 12:37 am

faub wrote:Another method would be to have two images, one for the comic and one for the text (transparent). You would use javascript and CSS to position the text over the comic.

Oh, you can use these scripts in keenspace? I tought they were outlawed, too. CSS I don't know, but with Java I've dabbled.

Note, though, that it wouldn't be two images but three: one for the art, and one for each language. It would kinda look odd/cool, though, to see the art appear first and then the words. And storage space is not as much a consideration as download time, so maybe this could work...

William G · Post by **William G** » Sun May 02, 2004 12:03 pm

I'd suggest chosing a language and sticking with it.

Most everyone in the world knows some English. And if you have it in Spanish or whatever, well, that'd be too damned bad for those lazy English speakers who can't be bothered to learn a second language.

Faub · Post by **Faub** » Sun May 02, 2004 3:06 pm

Javascript is fine on Keenspace. It's a client side scripting language. It's Perl, PHP and other server side scripting languages that are outlawed. That means multi-user, interactive elements of your page like forums, tagboards and such need to be handled by other sites.

You will need to handle your own cookies for user preferences, though.

Post by **Mercury Hat** » Sun May 02, 2004 3:17 pm

I just thought of something last night so I don't know if it's what you're looking for or not, but it seems like a simple solution (simple to me, at least, since HTML is about the limit of my programming skills).

How about, on the index page, instead of using the ***todays_comics*** tag, you code it by hand to where the user selects either "read the comic in Spanish" or "read the comic in English".

Clicking on either one would take you to a sub-index of, say, /esindex or /enindex.

Now, for your comics, you wouldn't name the comic pages by date and drop them in the comics folder. Instead, you'd make a .txt file, put all the code you want, and drop it in the comics folder. That way, autokeen will generate the html pages for you.

You wouldn't use any tags on the dailytemplate other than ***todays_comics***

So instead of putting the comic page in the comics folder, you would name, say, the Spanish one es01 and the English one en01 and put them in the images folder.

In the text file you would then do basic html where you would use an img src tag to put in the comic. You would have to do the links to "next comic", "previous comic", etc by hand, but I can't imagine it'd be all that difficult.

I hope that made sense, I thought it up when I was falling asleep...

McDuffies · Post by **McDuffies** » Sun May 02, 2004 3:51 pm

I totally suggest javascripting your pages so that when you run mouse over an image, it shows mexican version (english as main one *shrug*)
I've seen it on some sites, it sools very cool, and it's easy to implement. Heck, I had buttons made that way on my old site at the time I didn't know a thing about javascript - I just picked a script from some site that contained already written scripts for some cool features.

JexKerome · Post by **JexKerome** » Mon May 03, 2004 4:36 am

Though the idea of "click for spanish" sounds interesting, I don't think the reader would like to click once to move ahead, and then click again to get the image in their language.

Heavy manual coding seems to be the only solution. Maybe I can manage, since it would be only thrice a week, but...

McDuffies · Post by **McDuffies** » Mon May 03, 2004 4:44 pm

mcDuffies wrote:I totally suggest javascripting your pages so that when you run mouse over an image, it shows mexican version (english as main one *shrug*)
I've seen it on some sites, it sools very cool, and it's easy to implement. Heck, I had buttons made that way on my old site at the time I didn't know a thing about javascript - I just picked a script from some site that contained already written scripts for some cool features.

No heavy manual coding. Just altering a relatively simple code and putting it into your indextemplate and dailytemplate. Once.

Joel Fagin · Post by **Joel Fagin** » Mon May 03, 2004 5:16 pm

JexKerome wrote:Though the idea of "click for spanish" sounds interesting, I don't think the reader would like to click once to move ahead, and then click again to get the image in their language.

Use cookies to store the language preference. Probably just for when they choose "Spanish" since people tend to distrust cookies sometimes.

- Joel Fagin

Squis · Post by **Squis** » Wed Oct 13, 2004 12:12 pm

My brother did it all in a Flash-File:

http://magica.keenspace.com/

You can implement bitmap graphics into flash. It doesn't have to be all vector. There was some problem with autokeen, but he took care of it explaining how here:

viewtopic.php?t=60532

With Pandimaniacs ( http://pandimaniacs.keenspace.com/ ) we put the German version on another site.

JexKerome · Post by **JexKerome** » Wed Oct 13, 2004 4:55 pm

Joel Fagin wrote:
JexKerome wrote:Though the idea of "click for spanish" sounds interesting, I don't think the reader would like to click once to move ahead, and then click again to get the image in their language.
Use cookies to store the language preference. Probably just for when they choose "Spanish" since people tend to distrust cookies sometimes.

- Joel Fagin

This is the option I'm currently going for. And jsut for spanish. And I will make it clear I'm going to install a cookie. And I'm WAY behind on this project. I hoped to have it by now, but now a more realistic launch window is january 2005.

ZiRta · Post by **ZiRta** » Wed Nov 03, 2004 3:21 pm

if you get it to work, lemme know =) it'd be interesting to have another option besides getting two sites!