# Re: Fwd: Internationalized Sane

abel deuring (a.deuring@satzbau-gmbh.de)
Sat, 03 Apr 1999 16:41:06 +0200

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Andre wrote:

> I think, it would be cool if sane could present the settings in different
> languages (i.e. German). My first idea to do this: change the saneopts.h like
> this

Andre, you hit a really important point: While I think that the Sane
standard
is quite powerful, the lack of language support is a detail which I
found slightly
disappointing.

I also thought about it but have not yet sorted out my ideas, so some
"unsorted"
comments will follow :)

> So I have some little problems:
>
> 1) How shall SANE_Language be changed.
> - it could be done by the frontend
> - it could be a new param to SANE_Init ?
> - it could be made an extra Option ( best compatible way for me)

This is a really important point. Seen from the user's viewpoint, it
would
be the best to have a mechamism that would fit into the language
selection of
"larger environments" like KDE. I never had a look under the hood of KDE
or
Gnome, and also don't know how OS/2 handles language selection, so I
can't give
any practical comments...

> 2) Where shall the Strings be stored
> - it could be put in a header-file. but the more strings, the bigger
> the resulting file gets and it uses RAM.
> - it could be stored to an extra text file. but than there must be some
> functions for reading. And where to store this file.

I think, one or more text files (one file with "general texts" as
defined in
saneopts.h, and optionally one file per backend with texts specific to
that
backend) are preferable: Someone who wants to translate text files needs
not to
"mess around" in the source code. This means that a translator needs no
knowledge
of C, Makefiles and so on - he or she needs only to understand the
formal
structure of the text files.

PGP 2.x gives a good example how such "translation files" might look.

> I'd like to get some suggestions, whats the easiest way not to change all
> backends or the Sane-standard

I'm afraid that some changes will be necessary for the backends: many
texts
are "hard coded" into the *.c files of the backends...

Regarding the Sane standard: The language selection could be done with
an
environment variable like SANE_LANGUAGE or whatever. In this case a
modification of the standard would not be necessary.

Abel

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