[vlc-devel] Re: Is GetText incompatible with Russian at all?

[Sigmund Augdal]

> I just downloaded VideoLan player 1.5.3 for Windows - and found is is
> shipped with KOI8-encoded russian translation file.
> While this file is to work ok on Linux, BSD, etc - it is completely unusable
> under Win32!
> Until i delete it VLC shows all its windows|menus with absolutely unreadable
> text.
> 
> So i'd be glad if soemone will tell me about principal features of GetText:
>  1) Can .po file have info of used charset, so the gettext engine will
> translate the message of po-file before giving it to the program itself ?
> Otherwise we need different po-fiels for Unix, WinGUI and WinText.
To .po file do contain information on used charset, and gettext will
automatically convert to whatever cherset you want, you just have to tell it
witch one. So the lacking thing is little piece of code to ask windows witch
charset is to be used, and tell this to gettext. Currently vlc is (slowly)
moving towards keeping all strings in UTF8 internally, so vlc will tell
gettext to allways give the strings in utf8 and then convert them to the
proper charset before displaying them. VLC is also moving towards a gui
using the wxwindows library as the standard gui on windows, and the
wxwindows library has functions to convert UTF8 to the proper charset, so
this will greatly reduce the work needed to have the localization working
properly on windows. There are still a number of issues that have to be
sorted out with UTF8 before it becomes the standard, so don't expect this
fixed in 0.6.0, but perhaps in 0.6.1.

>  2) Can gettext change the order of parameters in string - or do it just
> return the string and do never care if it contains printf %xxxx parameters?
> That may sound boldly, but indeed it is often only possible to do only very
> ugly translation of message from English to Russian without words (and
> related parameters) re-ordering.
I don't think gettext take extra care of %xxxx parameters in printf strings,
so these has to stay in the given order. I can understand that this will
become a problem, but I don't know any workaround.
> 
> PS: i'm sorry asking the questions here, but it seems GNU GetText project is
> stopped far ago and there's no GT developers never more.
The core of the problem ( selecting the right charset) is indeed a problem
with vlc, and this was the right place to ask. Thanks for your feedback.

Sigmund
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