Multilingual interface

[Klaus]

Dag Terry,

> Hi all,
> 
> Who has bright ideas on how to handle multilingual projects? Creating two
> (or more) separate stacks gives a lot of extra work; especially during
> development.
> 
> I was thinking about some kind of a language-preference that gives all the
> buttons another label and give some fields another content.
> 
> The main problem is that I don't understand how I can change the content of
> a menu. There is something about dynamically changing a menu in the Rev
> Encyclopedia: About menus and the menu bar. I have to put a mousedown
> handler in the group. But what should it contain? Are there any examples of
> it?

i can just give some general hints on how to create multilingual projects.

A good way is to store all the strings in text-files and reading them in
e.g. after the user chose his favoutie language.

Won't take too long, it's MetaCard, you know? ;-)

Takes some time for planning the whole thing, but lateron, you just have to
replace the textfiles or add some new languages.

If you do not have any idea on how to achieve this, drop a line :-)

> Also, would I need to extend the switch stucture like:
> 
> on menuPick pWhich
> switch pWhich
> case "Save"
> case "Bewaar" -- Dutch for 'Save'
>   saveStuff
>   break
> case "Quit"
> case "Stop" -- Dutch; well that doesn't have to be explained
>   quitStuff
>   break
> end switch
> end menuPick

Here the "menuhistory" could be a solution.

It returns the number of the menu picked !!!

So if you know that (what language ever) the menuitem "save" (of "Bewaar",
als jij daarvan houdt ;-) is the first item, you could use:

on menupick
  switch the menuhistory of me
  case 1
    ##your save stuff here
  break
....

I think you get the picture...

This way the menus could even be kisuaheli and they will work
nevertheless.
 
> Finally, can I discover what language the OS is, so I can set the standard
> language preference setting of my stack to it?

Jammer, no idea ;-)

> Terry

Greetings/groetjes


Klaus Major <kmajor at metascape.org>
MetaScape GmbH