Re: Gettext and LC_MESSAGES
Hi,
From: "Petr Kolar" <Petr.Kolar@vslib.cz>
Subject: Re: Gettext and LC_MESSAGES
Date: Mon, 12 Jun 2000 09:16:15 +0200
> I admit I have not choosen the best examples. But currently the name
> of the capital can be placed only in LC_MESSAGES (if needed). And AFAIK
> LC_MONETARY contains only int_curr_symbol and currency_symbol (the
> abbreviations), so full names of the currencies must be also given in
> LC_MESSAGES (also only if needed by some program). If the messages contains
> word "colour" or "theatre", there should be also more catalogs for english
> (some with "colour" and some with "color", some with "theater" and some
> with "theatre") - and these catalogs will be in en_US en_GB etc., not in
> en.
I have never thought about "color" and "colour"... I agree with you.
Then the behavior of gettext that LANG=de gives German messages should
be changed, doesn't it? (I think catalogs can be installed in "en"
directory if messages of en_US, en_GB, and etc are identical.)
> It seems it is due to lack of documentation and experience. Like most
> (American) programmers did not write programs that worked with 8 bit
> characters in old days, many European programmers kill the program for
> Japanesse today, as they don't know, how to write it correctly, and
> also many Japanesse don't realize that there are other charsets (eg.
> ISO-8859-2) between ASCII or ISO-8859-1 and multibyte charsets.
> I don't think it is for bad intention...
I am writing a document on internationalization at Debian Documentation
Project (http://www.debian.org/doc/ddp). However, it is intended to be
read by developers, not by users, and does not mention the way to set
LANG variable and so on.
Japanese people don't use ISO-8859-1. Though it is true that ja_JP
LC_CTYPE locale uses ISO-8859-1, we use only 7-bit part of it (same
as ASCII).
I don't understand what should we care about to handle ISO8859-n
(n>1) character sets... (For example, xterm can display ISO8859-2
charset by specifying font name.) Petr, Could you please write
something and contribute to my document on i18n? I prepared chapters
for each language and each example of i18n-related improvement of
softwares.
I also would like you to contribute my 'language-env' package.
To handle Czech (I guess you are a Czech speaker from your mail
address... Sorry if I am wrong.) language, I think you need some
configuration. For example, a line in ~/.Xresources to display
ISO8859-2 font in xterm. 'language-env' is a Debian package to
set up users' personal environment for the users' native language.
I would like 'language-env' to support Czech. Please read
http://surfchem0.riken.go.jp/~kubota/linuxwork/language-env
for detail.
---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <kubota@debian.or.jp>
http://surfchem0.riken.go.jp/~kubota/
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