Naming images in multilingual projects.

[hm_marko]

Hi,

I'm finishing a document project which is currently in English. The document is supposed to be translated to a couple of other major European languages and I am wondering what would be the best naming strategy for images.

I have about 90 images in the default Images directory. Only a few of them are language-independent, i.e. they are little symbols like the function symbol or warning symbol. The majority of the images are screenshots of dialogs or snippets of the UI. They all contain text, so new screenshots must be produced for each language anyways. The names of language-independent images start with icon_ whilst the language-dependent images start with image_.

As far as I understand, the sibling projects created using project synchronization use relative paths. So if I do not use a language identifier in the image names, I could just replace the images in the folder of the sibling project and not touch the topics. Alternatively I could name my English images as image_en_* and for example German images image_de_*.

If the image file names include a language identifier, the sibling projects require more modifications. By looking at the topic files, it would seem that a recursive find and replace within the topics directory, e.g. "<image src="image_en_" --> "<image src="image_de_" would take care of image file references at one sweep.

Are there more things to consider? Will image files including a language identifier introduce more issues than correcting the image references in the XML topic files? Or should I just stick with the same image file names for all language versions?

Best regards,
Marko

[Tim Green]

Hi Marko,

It's really best to stick with the same names for all versions of the images, unless you yourself have a strong reason to do something different. That eliminates a lot of unnecessary work involving potential new error sources. If you do absolutely need to change the names, changing the references in the topics is all you need to do. The image file name in the topic is the only reference. Help+Manual then finds the image by searching through the folders in the project search path and using the first image file it finds with a matching name. (Which is why you have to avoid duplicate names in different image folders if you have more than one in your search path.)