Localization

[NeroBurner]

How can I add another language to ViewTouch?

I have found localization files for English and French po_files. How do I use them? How do I debug them? Is there documentation on how to contribute a new language? Which entries in the po_files are available to be localized?

https://github.com/ViewTouch/viewtouch/blob/f551941a5cbf185537fa433e85024a99d0fe0843/po_file/viewtouch.po_EN

[GeneMosher]

First of all, I'll state an unfortunate fact; this version of ViewTouch was begun and largely written in a time when a lot of tools did not yet exist, so we had to devise our own solutions without the benefit of many tools which have been developed in the past 20 years. One such tool is gnu gettext. Of course, the localization capabilities of the display and device input protocol on which ViewTouch is based, 'X' or The X Window System, go a very long and thoroughly proven way toward making ViewTouch usable in other languages.

Access to these files is done within ViewTouch under Superuser, logon 13524. Here's what we did in addition to X's localization features to address different languages. 1) Translation Mode, invoked by user Superuser, logon 13524, with F2, allows renaming of buttons in other languages. The directory /usr/viewtouch/dat/languages holds some files, but I myself have never attempted to do a ViewTouch menu in another language. locale.dat holds some changes, too. 2) ViewTouch Administrative Index provides an option to Customize some text and standards to suit users.

Ideally we would have gnu gettext implemented, anyone would agree.

A footnote: ViewTouch is not based on QT, or GTK, or any other graphical toolkit. There were no toolkits available when this version of ViewTouch was created, so the ViewTouch GUI was created as a tookit! It actually is the first graphical toolkit ever devised for Linux. ViewTouch is also the first GUI ever created for the building of point of sale systems in particular and for the building of touchscreen applications with a graphical user interface in general. Yes, all kinds of applications could be built with the ViewTouch toolkit for X. Applications built with ViewTouch will have the remote display capability of ViewTouch which supports multiuser workgroups already integrated into them because of the multiuser remote display/input capability which X is designed to support.

[NeroBurner]

thx for the explanation. While reading it I got the idea to make conf_file locale-independent 👍

I agree, that a trusted open source tool is the best way to go. A quick consultation of my search engine showed that gnu gettext indeed seems to be widely adopted