Re: [gtk-list] Re: GTK internationalization, right-to-left languages

[Tom Tromey <tromey cygnus com>]

Nimrod> On the other hand, switching a user interface should certainly
Nimrod> not require recompilation. At worst, it should require running
Nimrod> the application with a different command line switch.

I think we're all in agreement here.

Typically you'd do this by changing an environment variable:

	LANG=es gimp

would run it using the Spanish UI.


Nimrod> As mentioned in my mail, gettext alone is not enough because
Nimrod> Unicode support should somehow be incorporated into it.

Encoding issues are orthogonal to the use of gettext.  That is,
gettext doesn't really make deep assumptions about the encoding of the
translations.  You pass it a string, it passes back a string.

Using something like UTF-8 in the .po files would be perfectly
reasonable.


Of course, you still need a way to author such files.  But there are
various feasible approaches to that.  For instance, you could edit
using a locally convenient encoding (e.g., Latin-1 for European
languages), and then use something like recode to change the encoding
of the .po file.

Tom