wxWidgets/docs/doxygen/overviews/nonenglish.h
Francesco Montorsi 36c9828f70 removed useless spaces
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2008-02-19 13:28:24 +00:00

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/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// Name: nonenglish
// Purpose: topic overview
// Author: wxWidgets team
// RCS-ID: $Id$
// Licence: wxWindows license
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
/*!
@page nonenglish_overview Writing non-English applications
This article describes how to write applications that communicate with
the user in a language other than English. Unfortunately many languages use
different charsets under Unix and Windows (and other platforms, to make
the situation even more complicated). These charsets usually differ in so
many characters that it is impossible to use the same texts under all
platforms.
The wxWidgets library provides a mechanism that helps you avoid distributing many
identical, only differently encoded, packages with your application
(e.g. help files and menu items in iso8859-13 and windows-1257). Thanks
to this mechanism you can, for example, distribute only iso8859-13 data
and it will be handled transparently under all systems.
Please read #Internationalization which
describes the locales concept.
In the following text, wherever @e iso8859-2 and @e windows-1250 are
used, any encodings are meant and any encodings may be substituted there.
@b Locales
The best way to ensure correctly displayed texts in a GUI across platforms
is to use locales. Write your in-code messages in English or without
diacritics and put real messages into the message catalog (see
#Internationalization).
A standard .po file begins with a header like this:
@code
# SOME DESCRIPTIVE TITLE.
# Copyright (C) YEAR Free Software Foundation, Inc.
# FIRST AUTHOR EMAIL@ADDRESS, YEAR.
#
msgid ""
msgstr ""
"Project-Id-Version: PACKAGE VERSION\n"
"POT-Creation-Date: 1999-02-19 16:03+0100\n"
"PO-Revision-Date: YEAR-MO-DA HO:MI+ZONE\n"
"Last-Translator: FULL NAME EMAIL@ADDRESS\n"
"Language-Team: LANGUAGE LL@li.org\n"
"MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=CHARSET\n"
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: ENCODING\n"
@endcode
Note this particular line:
@code
"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=CHARSET\n"
@endcode
It specifies the charset used by the catalog. All strings in the catalog
are encoded using this charset.
You have to fill in proper charset information. Your .po file may look like this
after doing so:
@code
# SOME DESCRIPTIVE TITLE.
# Copyright (C) YEAR Free Software Foundation, Inc.
# FIRST AUTHOR EMAIL@ADDRESS, YEAR.
#
msgid ""
msgstr ""
"Project-Id-Version: PACKAGE VERSION\n"
"POT-Creation-Date: 1999-02-19 16:03+0100\n"
"PO-Revision-Date: YEAR-MO-DA HO:MI+ZONE\n"
"Last-Translator: FULL NAME EMAIL@ADDRESS\n"
"Language-Team: LANGUAGE LL@li.org\n"
"MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso8859-2\n"
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n"
@endcode
(Make sure that the header is @b not marked as @e fuzzy.)
wxWidgets is able to use this catalog under any supported platform
(although iso8859-2 is a Unix encoding and is normally not understood by
Windows).
How is this done? When you tell the wxLocale class to load a message catalog that
contains a correct header, it checks the charset. The catalog is then converted
to the charset used (see
wxLocale::GetSystemEncoding and
wxLocale::GetSystemEncodingName) by
the user's operating system. This is the default behaviour of the
#wxLocale class; you can disable it by @b not passing
@c wxLOCALE_CONV_ENCODING to wxLocale::Init.
@b Non-English strings or 8-bit characters in the source code
By convention, you should only use characters without diacritics (i.e. 7-bit
ASCII strings) for msgids in the source code and write them in English.
If you port software to wxWindows, you may be confronted with legacy source
code containing non-English string literals. Instead of translating the strings
in the source code to English and putting the original strings into message
catalog, you may configure wxWidgets to use non-English msgids and translate to
English using message catalogs:
If you use the program @c xgettext to extract the strings from
the source code, specify the option @c --from-code=source code charset.
Specify the source code language and charset as arguments to
wxLocale::AddCatalog. For example:
@code
locale.AddCatalog(_T("myapp"),
wxLANGUAGE_GERMAN, _T("iso-8859-1"));
@endcode
@b Font mapping
You can use @ref mbconvclasses_overview and
#wxFontMapper to display text:
@code
if (!wxFontMapper::Get()-IsEncodingAvailable(enc, facename))
{
wxFontEncoding alternative;
if (wxFontMapper::Get()-GetAltForEncoding(enc, ,
facename, @false))
{
wxCSConv convFrom(wxFontMapper::Get()-GetEncodingName(enc));
wxCSConv convTo(wxFontMapper::Get()-GetEncodingName(alternative));
text = wxString(text.mb_str(convFrom), convTo);
}
else
...failure (or we may try iso8859-1/7bit ASCII)...
}
...display text...
@endcode
@b Converting data
You may want to store all program data (created documents etc.) in
the same encoding, let's say @c utf-8. You can use
#wxCSConv class to convert data to the encoding used by the
system your application is running on (see
wxLocale::GetSystemEncoding).
@b Help files
If you're using #wxHtmlHelpController there is
no problem at all. You only need to make sure that all the HTML files contain
the META tag, e.g.
@code
meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso8859-2"
@endcode
and that the hhp project file contains one additional line in the @c OPTIONS
section:
@code
Charset=iso8859-2
@endcode
This additional entry tells the HTML help controller what encoding is used
in contents and index tables.
*/