Re: How to internationalize: GNU or GScript

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

robert_gasch@peoplesoft.com writes:

> Hi,
> 
> thinking about internationalizing my app and looking around on the web,
> I came across
> 
>      http://www.labs.redhat.com/~otaylor/gscript/
> 
> which lists the GScript project which aims at complete internationalization
> of GTK (apps).

Actually, GScript is a project to redo the internationalization
of the GTK+ internals - in particular the way that GTK+ will
render different scripts.

The typical application will not deal with GScript directly - it
simply will just use Unicode for all its strings and they will be
displayed correctly.

> Through a previous query on this list, I also found
> 
>      http://i44www.info.uni-karlsruhe.de/~drepper/conf96/paper.html
> 
> which explains how to internationalize using the GNU approach.
> 
> Could anybody who knows, briefly explain what the differences (or added
> value, to use a marketing term) for GScript are. Are there any issues with
> the GNU ways that GScript solves? Why would I want to use one or the
> other?

GScript will allow programs using GTK+ to display a wider range
of languages with better rendering quality than is currently
possible with GTK+. (Or any other toolkit available for X.)

>From the point of view of localization - i.e. providing
translation of an applications messages into different languages,
it will have only a small effect on the way things work now -
people will still most likely use gettext(), as described in
Ulrich Drepper's paper referenced above.

The only difference is that the message strings in the .po files
will be encoded in Unicode (specifically UTF-8) instead of in a
locale-specific encoding.

Regards,
                                        Owen