SLES/SLED German: footer runs into the second line

[jfaltenbacher]

Problem Description

Deployment and Upgrade Guide
DE (SLES): footer runs into the second line (see screen deployment_DE_Footer.png and upgrade_DE_footer.png in Jira

Probably all languages affected

[tomschr]

That's correct, but it's a general problem. The footer contains already the long product name. Adding the long German titles make it even longer. 🙁 I don't know how to solve it without losing information.

I could add a length check and cut the string at a specific position plus add an ellipsis (…). But I'm not sure if this is enough. Additionally, you can loose the release which is quite important to distinguish different papers.

Any other idea?

[jfaltenbacher]

from looking at the screens, it looks like the footer is not taking advantage of the full page size, there would be some space to the left:

[tomschr]

there would be some space to the left:

I've checked it with colored boxes and I could stretch this area a bit. This was a test of the German Deployment's footer:

The green box is the page number, the blue is the current topic title an the release.

With this method I could determine the maximum of character that a title must not exceed. If you are less then 86 characters it should be fine. Anything else... not so.

Another approach would be to make writers and translators aware of a size limit in titles.

[jfaltenbacher]

Stretching the box a bit looks like a good solution. Why is there such a big space between the title and version number? Maybe this could be tweaked as well.

I believe with Smart Docs we have a title length restriction anyhow? Or just for the main book titles (my brain does not fully remember).
Restricting the titles might be beneficial for SEO as well (maybe check back with Jana)?

But some languages will have a hard time to stick to the char limit.

[tomschr]

Ok, there was a leader between the title and the release and I replaced it with the string " | ". This is what I get:

Perhaps we can squeeze out another 4 characters, but that's the maximum as far as I can go. The title has to be less than 90 characters otherwise we get in trouble.

Yes, we had some restrictions in Smart Docs, but that was mostly separate metadata and the guide. For titles inside the guide we didn't have restrictions (although it was kind of implied to follow the same rules.) And yes, restricting the title length is beneficial on multiple levels.

But some languages will have a hard time to stick to the char limit.

Really? Which one?

[jfaltenbacher]

Thanks for the effort. Can we introduce a character limitation for ?

[tomschr]

Can we introduce a character limitation for ?

To do what? Fail validation? Raise a warning? Abort? All of these have side effects: Warnings are usually ignored. A failure during validation or an aborted build would be noticeable, but could lead to problems in maintenance branches. What if you just want to build a translated document that fails this check? If you can't understand the language to fix this issue, it's impossible to continue. Multiply it with x languages and it can quickly cause headaches.😆

A character limitation check is technically easy. But the question is the action that follows, what to do with that. That's the tricky part.

Hmn... maybe we could introduce these and other restrictions in a GitHub Action. 🤔

[jfaltenbacher]

for the languages, it should be possible that Vistatec sets a limitation on their end in the translation memory tool. Will check that in my call with them next week. But I am pretty sure, we have introduced this for the Smart Docs (meta description and alike) already