[LSC] Internationalisation (I18N) of the part library

[Travis Cobbs]

On 10/10/06, Lars C. Hassing <lars at hassings.dk> wrote:
>
> Travis Cobbs wrote:
> > I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing MLCad uses standard Windows
> > stuff for i18n.  In other words, all the work is done by translating the
> > resource file.
> >
> > In LDView, I go that way for the dialog boxes, but since much of the
> > other text will be shared between Windows, Linux, etc. versions, I just
> > created a small class that reads in a string table from a file in ini
> > format.  That was fairly quick and easy.
>
> Yeah, but that's the GUI of the programs.
> What I meant was support of I18N of the parts library.


Yes and no.  When you have a GUI program, almost everything that needs to be
translated is presented via the GUI.  This doesn't mean that all of the text
is GUI-related.  For example, in LDView, all the warnings and error messages
that I generate during loading of a model file ultimately end up in the
GUI.  But the actual text isn't exactly GUI-related.

If I wanted to add a part inventory feature to LDView (which I do), I'd need
to use whatever is decided on as the i18n standard for the parts library.
I'd still be presenting the information to the user via LDView's GUI, but
the i18n information would come from whatever we decide on here.  I could
say that we should adopt simple INI files for library translations, where
the original Australian English text from the part library files is the key,
and the translated text is the value.  I could fairly easily drop this into
LDView's existing i18n support with minimal changes on my part.  Mind you, I
don't think that's at all a good idea at all.

My point about MLCad was that its current i18n stuff is all Windows UI.  So
while Michael may indeed have an opinion on how we should go about adding
i18n support to the parts library, I don't think his work to date really
provides a good reference.

It wouldn't affect LDView, would it?


Not with LDView's current feature set, but as I said above, I'd like to add
part inventory support to LDView.

--Travis
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