Re: Translation to german

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Günther Noack <gnoack guenthernoack de> writes:

> Hi,
> 
> this is probably one of the most stupid questions ever asked on
> this mailinglist. I don't get the german translation to work on
> my computer.
> 
> Everytime there is a string with U-Umlaut, A-Umlaut, O-Umlaut or
> SZ, GTK+ 2 / Pango either stops showing the string when trying to
> write the umlaut or doesn't show it at all.
> 
> I also don't understand the UTF8-Encoding. I tried it, but it didn't
> work. :-/

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html

May help in getting you oriented as to what UTF-8 is.
 
> I'm still searching for a good documentation describing the use of
> UTF8 in Pango and a big table how to translate alien chars to UTF8.

This easiest thing is probably to have UTF-8 as the source
language of your program .. recent versions of Emacs can
edit UTF-8 text (at least for languages like German.)
vim running under a UTF-8 locale also seems to work.

If that isn't feasible you can convert strings from ISO-8859-1
(the typical encoding for German) to UTF-8 using g_convert:

 utf8_string = g_convert (str, -1, "UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1", 
                          NULL, NULL, NULL);

[ omitting error handling, which, assuming proper configuration
  of GLib shouldn't necessary for this particular conversion
  though it is needed in general . ]

Regards,
                                        Owen