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Comment by gyomu | Hacker News Reader

> At the same time, who among us didn’t nod in recognition at least, having once spent hours massaging a button UI string or a tooltip just to get it to fit under the certain width in a densely packed interface?

I did, and then I got a customer email about how they were using a display-zoom OS accessibility feature and things were truncated on their device. :')

See also: localizing your interface to German

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Yep, any concern about text widows and orphans in modern app layouts becomes irrelevant as soon as you have to localize.

Just build your layout so it can squash/stretch appropriately.

Or if you're really insane, localize the entire UI.

And accessibilize it. Pixel perfect per zoom level per language per font variant per font.

Don't forget increased-contrast too!

Is that insane? Every game[0][1] I ever helped ship has had fully localized UI. In game development that seems to be the standard way of doing things. And it requires a lot of testing and sometimes comes with workflows to automatically test that all strings fit their intended box.

[0] Before I worked on game development I actually worked in virtual surgery simulation, and there we also had a localized UI with a very large number of supported languages and tooling to detect issues.

[1] Need For Speed (2015), NFS: Payback, NFS: Heat, Lost in Random, Wavetale

Anyone who ever worked as a front end developer definitely felt this.

Even as a backend dev who dabbles in frontend as a hobby - I get the view looking great on desktop, then a week later I open the site on mobile and am horrified

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