[PD-dev] locales and iemgui

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

Actually, I just found out that the GNU gettext utils for .po files  
are included in Tcl/Tk in a package called "msgcat".  Here's a little  
bit more on the topic:

http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/gettext/Tcl.html

.hc

On Jan 5, 2009, at 4:33 PM, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:

>
> Hey Chun, all,
>
> I am thinking that for adding locales to pd-devel, we should leave  
> iemgui out of it.  It is very messy code that has a lot of legacy  
> use, so that the iemgui stuff would need to have full backwards  
> compatibility.  Instead, I think we should build a new GUI library  
> that includes locale support.  In the process we could make a locale  
> API for people who want to write their own GUI objects and include  
> translations.  I have almost the whole framework for such a library  
> finished, its called 'tkwidgets'.
>
> Perhaps it makes sense to use the standard .po file format for  
> locales, its pretty simple and would be easy to parse in Tcl.  I  
> imagine there are tools for working with .po files, so then we could  
> use those.  Then init_locale() could read the .po into a hashtable,  
> i.e. $hashtable($key).  My guess is that a big hashtable would be  
> faster than the current say() procedure, but I could be wrong.
>
> Or maybe a locale namespace makes more sense, it would just be lots  
> of variable names, something like:
>
> namespace eval ::pd_locale:: {
> 	variable file_new
> 	variable file_open
> 	variable file_save
> 	variable file_saveas
> ...
> 	variable edit_undo
> 	variable edit_redo
> 	variable edit_cut
> 	variable edit_copy
> ...
> 	variable put_object
> 	variable put_message
> 	variable put_numberbox
> 	variable put_symbolbox
> 	variable put_comment
> ...
> }
>
> Then to use them:
>
> $rootmenu add command -label $::pd_locale::file_new -accelerator  
> "$accelerator+N"
> $rootmenu add command -label $::pd_locale::file_open -accelerator  
> "$accelerator+O"
> $rootmenu add command -label $::pd_locale::file_save -accelerator  
> "$accelerator+S"
>
> But I suppose it might make more sense to programmatically declare  
> the 'variable's.
>
> .hc