GRASS Congress

[Justin Hickey]

Hello Daniel

On Nov 9,  2:01pm, Daniel Dupré wrote:
> One of the main cornerstones for widening Grass use is to have a Spanish /
> Portuguese Grass international version, as Red Hat and ARC/info are doing. In
> spite
> I'm away for so many years from home, my mother language - French - would be
> very
> nice too ;)))

There are two main steps to turn GRASS multilingual. The easiest step is to
change tcltkgrass so that all hardcoded text that appears in the GUI is
represented by variables. Then all you need is a file for each language you
want to support with the translated text for each item per line. You tell
tcltkgrass which language to use and it loads the file into the variables. We
actually did this on an attempt to re-write tcltkgrass for Thai purposes back
before the current tcltkgrass was released. Needless to say, when it was
released, we stopped developing our own. Unfortunately, I have not had the time
to implement this on the current version.

The hard step is to change the text in the graphics monitors. This requires
that the GRASS font system be changed to use X fonts instead of its own built
in fonts. I have no idea what this would entail in terms of how the code will
need to be changed, but I believe it would be fairly extensive. I have been
hoping that this change would take place soon.

Of course, changing messages printed by grass programs is another story.

-- 
Sincerely,

Jazzman (a.k.a. Justin Hickey)  e-mail: jhickey at hpcc.nectec.or.th
High Performance Computing Center
National Electronics and Computer Technology Center (NECTEC)
Bangkok, Thailand
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Jazz and Trek Rule!!!
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