Copyright  Acorn Computers Ltd. 1991       0396,013/FS Issue 1 ****LIVE****

        RISC OS Green UK/International Sprites Functional Specification
        ===============================================================

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                   | Drawing No : 0396,013/FS              |
                   |      Issue : 1 ****LIVE****           |
                   |       Date : 17th December 1991       |
                   |     Author : Owen Smith               |
                   |  Change No : AMR xxxx                 |
                   |     Sheets : n                        |
                   |  Last Issue: x (AMR xxxx of nn.nn.nn) |
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Introduction
============

Some of the existing sprites in RISC OS 3.00 contain English words or have
English conotations. If we leave these visible in foreign systems the user
will have a poor impression of the quality of the localisation. If we do a
different set for foreign systems this will lead to inconsistencies between
the graphical appearance of UK and foreign systems, which is underisable
both from a product image point of view and with regard to documentation
screen shots. Also a RAM loaded localisation will use up even more RAM if it
has to load replacement localised sprites.

Many of the sprites with English words in them also contain the Archimedes
'A' symbol, which is now deprecated in favour of the green Acorn symbol to
emphasise the company name. Changing the task manager icon on the icon bar
to a green Acorm without changing all the other occurences of the Archimedes
symbol, as in RISC OS 3.00, is inconsistent and gives the feeling that the
job was only half done.

Therefore it is proposed that we kill two birds with one stone and change
all of the sprites in RISC OS green which have either of the above faults.
The Archimedes symbol will be replaced with a green Acorn where appropriate,
and the English words will be replaced with internationally recognisable
symbols except in the case of invariant words eg. *EXEC (which is a
command).


Implementation costs
====================

The sprites (all variants ie. standard, hi-res colour and hi-res mono) have
already been designed. They have also been seen by a reasonable number of
people and their feedback acted upon hence there is no work left to do on
designing the sprites unless any changes to them are desired.

Incorporating the sprites into the RISC OS green source tree will take
approximately half a day.

There will be no impact on code. Changing the sprites is extremely unlikely
to cause any cascade bugs in the system.

There will be an impact on TechPubs as they will have to redo some of the
screen shots for the manual. However some of the shots already need to be
redone anyway. TechPubs estimate the impact on them as 1 to 2 days.


Incidental benefits
===================

It is generally felt that most of the new sprites look nicer than the old
ones.

Many of the new sprites are more easily distinguishable from each other than
the old ones.

A lot of the new sprites match the Adelaide colour scheme.


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