Marco Ciampa writes:
>On Sun, Jan 30, 2005 at 12:07:52AM +0300, Vadim V. Zhytnikov wrote:
>
>
>>Tcl has it's own translation mechanism called msgcat
>>(since version 8.2 AFAIK). In the Maxima CVS source tree
>>you can see two files:
>>
>>/plotting/msgs/ru.msg
>>/interfaces/xmaxima/msgs/ru.msg
>>
>>
>I've seen that but I'm trying to push the use of standard mechanism and
>tools for translating maxima.
>Why change and use gettext?
>For many reasons...
>
> - It's easyer to update the translations using tools like msgmerge or
> msguniq
> - You can use standard tools for translating like emacs (po-mode),
> kbabel, poedit etc that really improve productivity of about
> 300%!
> - You can use different encodings like UTF-8, iso-8859-1, etc
>
>etc.
>
>
>
Ok, all these advanced tools are very nice. And if
you find it helpful in making new translation then fine!
As far as I understand all things listed in
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/tcl_announce/message/1750
are just to simplify creation of new .msg files.
But all xmaxima/omplotdata needs is a set of final .msg
files for different languages and I really don't see any
pressing reason to include any extra machinery in Maxima
distribution.
BTW, translation string in .msg should be in UTF-8.
This is how it works for Russian - one ru.msg file
gives me correct translation in all encodings I tried,
even on Windows.
There is yet one more strategical reason why I don't like
to fiddle with xmaxima too much. I don't expect it evolve.
We are expecting to have new standard graphical frontend
for Maxima in some near future. On the other hand xmaxima
is still there for a couple of years, especially on Windows,
and making translation (not big deal - just a 20Kb work)
may be helpful.
--
Vadim V. Zhytnikov