[PD] help patch translations

Jonathan Wilkes jancsika at yahoo.com
Thu Apr 30 00:41:33 CEST 2015


Hi Miller,
I've got a fairly fleshed out idea for how to do internationalized help 
patches in Pd.

It would be nice to store the translations as files containing FUDI 
messages, like this:

description something something;
outlet_0 float translated description of what a float arriving at the 
0th inlet does;
outlet_0 list etc...;
demo-slider label foo;
demo-bang label bar;

The benefit is that one could actually parse the translation data using 
Pd itself.  Here, the description and outlet data could be forwarded to 
the gui (to format in a footer that reflows with the width of the 
window).  Additionally, the "demo" slider and bang could be sent to 
iemgui receives to get a translated label. (Perhaps prepending a "$0-" 
to guard against nameclashes in other open patch windows.)

The problem of course is that FUDI is too brittle for arbitrary text.  
It's too easy to lose data, and too difficult to try to remember all the 
ways in which numbers, commas, semis, decimals, dollarsigns, and 
"dropped" keycodes can result in a data loss.  Not impossible to work 
around, but burdensome for doc writers trying to concentrate on 
translating explanatory text.

Is there any way to read or write FUDI-- perhaps with [text]-- and tell 
the parser to interpret everything after the nth atom as a single symbol?

If not, I can just store the translation data as JSON (which I'm already 
doing for the gui interfaction translations).  In that case I'd just 
read the translations from the GUI side, and forward any iemgui label 
messages on to Pd.

-Jonathan



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