[PD-dev] locales and iemgui

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

Ok, responding to myself again :D  It turns out that msgcat has been  
part of Tcl since 8.1:

http://tcl.tk/man/tcl8.4/TclCmd/msgcat.htm

It looks like this is definitely the way to handle locales.

.hc

On Jan 5, 2009, at 7:18 PM, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:

>
> 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
>