Re: Internationalized text
Re: Internationalized text
- Subject: Re: Internationalized text
- From: Clark Cox <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2003 11:39:54 -0400
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On Monday, Sep 29, 2003, at 10:47 US/Eastern, Darrin Cardani wrote:
I am writing an application that will be used to produce text in
multiple languages. It's a translation tool of sorts, so documents
will likely have text in many different languages within them. Some of
the text the user enters may end up in menus in the interface, too.
For example, they may view their document in it's original English
text. Then they can choose another language that they've translated it
into, and view it in that language.
So I'm left with a couple of questions.
1) What is the best (cross-platform) way to store the data on disk?
What information do I need to make sure that when the document is
opened on another computer, it is still legible?
Store it in Unicode.
2) What is the best way to put multi-lingual data into interface
elements? For example, if the user has English and Greek versions of
their document, I would want my popup menu to have the word "English"
(in Roman letters), and the word "Ellinika" in Greek letters in the
menu, probably. Can that be done? I was planning on allowing the user
to enter the name of the languages they will be translating to and
from, so the popup menu could theoretically have words in dozens of
languages and scripts in it.
Yes that can be done, and because Cocoa uses Unicode it's rather
trivial. There is no need to differentiate between languages and
scripts. The popup menu can contain items in wildly different
languages, you can even mix them in a single item. The same goes for
the rest of the UI elements.
3) What internal data types (again, cross-platform preferred) should
be used for keeping around the data the user enters?
Again, use Unicode
I'm a little new to doing this sort of thing. I've dealt with
multi-byte text in the Classic toolbox a little bit, using functions
like CharacterByteType (), etc., but it seems like things have
progressed quite a bit since those days. Any help would be > appreciated.
Yes, things have advanced. If you use NSString, CFString, or any decent
3rd party Unicode string library, most of these issues simply go away.
- --
Clark S. Cox III
email@hidden
http://homepage.mac.com/clarkcox3/blog/B1196589870/index.html
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