1 README.i18n: Instructions for Translating KStars
2 copyright 2002 by Jason Harris and the KStars team.
3 This document is licensed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License
4 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
7 Some parts of i18n in KStars are a bit complicated, so we provide
8 this document to answer some questions you might have.
10 + Strings in data files.
12 KStars has many data files that contain strings that you may want
13 to translate: cities.dat, cnames.dat, image_url.dat, info_url.dat
15 We have modified our Makefile to automatically parse these files
16 and generate a "dummy" source file that only contains the translatable
17 strings from our data files. The file is called "kstars-i18n.cpp".
18 Once the kstars.pot file is generated, this file is destroyed.
20 The advantage to this is that it requires no special effort on the
21 part of the translation teams; the data file strings are automatically
22 added to our POT file. The disadvantage is that our POT file is now
23 quite large! Especially because of the city names. Probably, most of
24 the city names won't need to be translated. We added a comment to
25 these strings indicating that they are optional.
27 cnames.dat contains constellation names, in Latin. We include
28 an option in the program to display "Localized" names instead of
29 Latin names; if you want this to work for your language, you'll
30 need to provide translations for the strings in the POT file which
31 have a comment like: "Constellation name (optional)".
34 + Alternate internet URL lists
36 KStars provides many internet links to images and information on
37 specific objects in the sky. The links appear in an object's
38 right-click popup menu. The POT file already provides the link
39 text for translation, but there's still a problem: the websites
40 that the links go to are all in English!
42 If you want to provide internet links that point to websites
43 in your native language, you can. Add a file to the CVS tree at:
44 kde-i18n/<lang>/data/kdeedu/kstars/info_url.dat (where <lang> is
45 the two-letter code for your language). This file should contain
46 the list of internet links you want KStars to use when localized
47 for your language. You can look at the default info_url.dat to
48 figure out the file format; briefly, it's a colon-delimited line
49 with fields: object name, link text, link URL
51 Note that your alternate info_url.dat file will completely replace
52 the default, so if you want to include some links from the original,
53 you will need to copy them over. Some of the sites we link to provide
54 versions of their pages in other languages (e.g., seds.org). So
55 for these sites, you can just modify the URLs from the default file.
57 (you can also provide a localized version of image_url.dat, but this
58 is probably unnecessary since these are only image links).