Re: General localization question

[<ssingh up elctech com>]

Great.  Thanks a lot.  This is exactly what I was looking for, there
probably will be some bugs or errors to catch but when aren't there?  I
agree that if support for many languages can be generalized there is no
point to limit myself or others.  Thanks again.

-Samir Singh

> Kaixo!
>
> and happy new year!
>
> On Fri, Dec 21, 2001 at 12:40:36PM -0800, Samir A. Singh wrote:
>
> > I'm interested in adding localization to my program but I've never used
> > any of the locale stuff in gnome or gtk.  I've been perusing the archives
> > and I noticed this written a while back...
> >
> > > > If somebody wants to write an entry on "How do I make my program
> > > > suitable for international use?" for the GTK+ FAQ, that would be
> > > > appreciated.
> > > > I wrote something like that some time ago;
> > > look at http://www.linuxi18n.org/gtk-en.html
> >
> > Was something like this ever written?  I guess the above link was a
> > project hosted by mandrakesoft.com but it's gone now.
>
> You can still read it on http://chanae.stben.be/pablo/i18n/
>
> > Anybody know a
> > good place to find general info on this stuff.
>
> There are some generic i18n docs, and the KDE docs are useful too; however
> not Gtk specific, I don't know if that has changed since then, but that
> was the reason I wrote those two pages: to keep track of the Gtk specific
> steps needed.
>
> > I may not need to support
> > different character sets,
>
> Don't think in those terms, that is the wrong way.
> You just have to thing in terms of "itnernationalized" or
> "not internationalized".
> With a good toolkit (and Gtk is) and if you follow the proper steps, then
> you, as a programmer, don't have to worry about "charsets", it is done
> automatically by the i18n layer.
>
> > I may just support languages commonly written
> > using english characters, spanish, french, etc.  If that is a much simpler
> > thing to do let me know.  Thanks.
>
> For a Gtk program the only difference between a bad program limited
> only to iso-8859-1 encoding and leaving out in frustration a lot of people
> (including Europeans that wouldn"t be able to use the euro sign) and a good
> i18n'ed program allowing to use cyrillic, greek, unicode, japanese, etc.
> is only (with Gtk 1.2.*):
>
> * calling gtk_set_locale();
> * using *_fontset() instead of *_font() functions (and, if you hardcode some
>   font names in the source, add a fallback ",*" to them).
>
> With a Gnome program you don't even need to call gtk_set_locale();, it is
> done automatically.
>
> So, the only thing you have to do is not force the use of any particular
> font encoding, that's all. and your program will be able to work for all
> languages and encodings supported by the toolkit (that currently (Gtk 1.2.*)
> excludes some complex or right-to-left scripts, for technical reasons
> of the toolkit; with future Gtk 2 it will be supported, and font selection
> and manipulation will be easier and more transparent)
>
> Of course, there are other things to do for an i18n program, but theose
> are common to one only limited to English and German and for one supporting
> any kind of language. So, there is no reason to purposedly limit your
> program.
>
> I put in http://chanae.stben.be/pablo/i18n/gtk-en.html
> the steps to add i18n support to a Gtk and Gnome program.
> And in http://chanae.stben.be/pablo/i18n/gettext-en.html the steps to
> use gettext, and to add the needed things to autoconf and co.
>
> There may be some errors maybe, I did it in an empiric way, out of my own
> experience. For example I learned only recently that setlocale() should
> not be used, but gtk_set_locale() be used instead, otherwise multi-byte
> encodings have width problems.
> I'll appreciate comments and corrections of course.
>
> And the pages could be copied/adapted to official Gtk/Gnome docs if someone
> think they are usefull.
>
> >
> > -Samir Singh
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > gtk-i18n-list mailing list
> > gtk-i18n-list gnome org
> > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-i18n-list
>
>

-- 
Samir A. Singh | Junior Engineer
ELC Technologies
1532 State Street Suite C
Santa Barbara, Ca 93101
ssingh elctech com

(805) 884.8300 phn
(805) 884.8339 fax

http://www.elctech.com

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