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# RE: GEMS - Multi language ballot printing

- To: <support@dieboldes.com>
- Subject: RE: GEMS - Multi language ballot printing
- From: "Ken Clark" <ken@dieboldes.com>
- Date: Sat, 31 Aug 2002 21:01:11 -0700
- Importance: Normal
- In-reply-to:

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-----
From: Ken Clark [mailto:ken@dieboldes.com]
Sent: Saturday, August 31, 2002 9:00 PM
To: 'support@dieboldes.com'
Subject: RE: GEMS - Multi language ballot printing

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 Ken Clark
Sent: Sunday, August 25, 2002 6:15 PM
To: support@dieboldes.com
Subject: RE: GEMS - Multi language ballot printing

From: owner-support@gesn.com [mailto:owner-support@gesn.com] On Behalf Of Steve Knecht
Sent: Sunday, August 25, 2002 12:09 PM
To: support@dieboldes.com
Subject: GEMS - Multi language ballot printing

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 San Diego or Santa Clara, how will the manual effort be helped by

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
Sent: Sunday, August 25, 2002 12:12 PM
To: support@dieboldes.com
Subject: Followup to Last Multilangugae ballot Printing question

San Diego wants to put all ballot styles up on their web site, including the multi language ballots. Will the "name" of the pdf reflect something about the language vs. just the cardnumber, so we can automate the sample ballot printing process with Merrill (sample ballot printer) and with IT for web access to ballot images?

The language name will be in the file name. Probably English-10-10F.pdf, or somesuch.

Ken

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