well, by "translation", understand "string replacement"
practicaly, you "translate" raw strings into something more pleasant to read
for human.
so the translation system is useful even if you use only one language.
you can certainly override the template in your project and simply directly
replace the string inside but this will not work for the other string
recovered from php, ini and mapfile
regards
Oliver
Hi Oliver,
Thanks so much for your patient and clarifying response. Using what you
wrote and going through the Cartoweb documentation and the web again, I
now realize something which was not obvious to me before: that the whole
text translation scheme is a widely-used method, not limited just to
Cartoweb... Since I have never developed with these tools or with
internationalization before, I did not know about Gnu gettext and the
po/mo files; I thought it was something special to Cartoweb. Now I can
read the gettext documentation to understand much more.
One thing is still not quite clear to me: do I need to worry about
gettext, po/mo files, and all of that if I just want to change some pieces
of text *without translation* (the example I used last night is changing
the zoomin tool hover text from "Zoom In" to "Choose this tool and click
on the map to zoom in")? I think the answer is "yes" -- even though I am
not trying to internationalize or translate or localize the text, I think
I must create po files and add my new text as the "translation" for the
"zoomin" msgid. Is that correct?
One reason I am still confused on this point is that every reference to
text and messages in the Cartoweb documentation talks about *translation*.
There are lots of places that say, more or less, "If you need to translate
this, you will need gettext... etc". I am not translating anything, so at
first I thought none of those discussions applied to my situation, but now
I think that changing the default text is basically the same process as
translating. Is this correct?
I will continue my reading and then try to make sense of your examples and
suggestions. Thanks again for starting to point me in the right direction.
And thanks to you and Bruno for pointing out that gettext is apparently
needed but not working or not available on my live web server... I will
look into that problem after I get my development system correctly
changing the text I'm working on.
Cheers,
Chris
Oliver Christen wrote:
hi
po are only human readable container for the text<->translation strings
when running the cw3setup script, the .po get compilated by gettext into
binary .mo, these files are located in
cartoweb3/locale/*langcode*/LC_MESSAGES/*projectid.projectid.projectid*.mo
these are the files actualy used by gettext to do the string replacement
in real time.
the .po contains the string you want to translate.
For convenience, cartoweb include 2 scripts one can use to generate some
basic .mo for a given project: client2pot and server2pot.
These script simply look inside all the files of your project for every
strings included into I18n::gt(...) call (in php file) or into {t}...{/t}
tag (in templates files). additionaly, the server2pot also get all the
layer's labels from either the layers.ini file or the mapfile.
dynamicaly generated strings will not get "recovered" by those scripts
unless someone provided some fake/hidden {t}..{/t} or I18n::gt(...), for
example for the tools's labels.
client.po, server.*projectid*.po, server.po contain the raw
(untranslated) list of strings for a given project.
msgid "IdRecentering"
msgstr ""
client.en.po, server.*projectid*.en.po, server.en.po are COPIES!!! of the
raw .po but this time they ALSO contain the translated strings for the
corresponding language.
msgid "IdRecentering"
msgstr "Identifiers recentering"
to quickly add translations to your projects, you can easily copy the
existing .po files provided in cartoweb by default and modify them. You
will have some extra translated/unwanted strings but nothing that cant be
easily modified/removed if needed.
copy ALL the .po files into your project's po folder.
look at an existing demo /po folder to see whats there.
if you want "clean" po files, you need to run the client2pot and
server2pot scripts to generate the RAW po files for your project and then
COPY these files and rename them with the extra 2 letters lang tag (.po >
.en.po) and EDIT them to add the translations for all the strings you
want.
I would suggest moving/deleting all .po existing in cartoweb3/po/ BEFORE
doing that, as if some .po already exist, the script will try to merge
their content with the newly extracted content, which may be problematic.
so once you have emptied the /po folder, go to /cartoweb3/scripts/ and
run the command "php client2pot.php *yourprojectid*" and "php
server2pot.php *yourprojectid*"
if you see ("zoomin", "query_by_bbox") it means the strings are NOT
translated.
check that gettext is installed and that it works correctly (see
documentation on how to test that
http://www.cartoweb.org/doc/cw3.5/xhtml/user.i18n.html#user.i18n.translations.debug)
restart Apache too.
gettext is a bit buggy and sometimes you need to restart Apache to see
the modification you did in the .po files even after you have run the
cw3setup script to generate the .mo
regards
Oliver
----- Original Message ----- From: "Chris Duncan, GISmatters"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Cartoweb Users" <cartoweb-users@lists.maptools.org>
Sent: Wednesday, October 15, 2008 11:30 PM
Subject: [Cartoweb-users] Confused about .po files
I am *not* trying to internationalize my application -- for our user
base and local application, there's no need to support any other
language than English.
I would like, however, to change some of the text that appears (for
example, in the tips that pop up when you hover over a tool like the
zoom-in tool).
I have tried to understand the system of .po files (defaults,
project-specific, alternate languages, sources vs. generated, etc), but
have become completely confused. I have not found enough info in the
documentation or wiki to clear up my confusion.
Could someone please provide a simple, clear, concise discussion of the
following (if you don't have lots of time to answer, then please just
skip to item (c) which is my most urgent question):
(a) When, and in what order, do .po files get used? For one thing, I'm
confused about what happens when I refresh the installation using
cw3setup vs. what happens at runtime when someone is using the site. I
see that there are *generated* .po files in the htdocs/po folder... I
assume *those* are the ones that actually provide text to the
application at runtime. But even there I find "default" and
project-specific folders and files. Where do "source" files live, and
what is the chain of processing that converts and/or merges them to
create the ones I see in htdocs/po?
(b) When do language-specific files get used? If there is both a
client.po and client.en.po file, which one gets used? What is the
interaction of the "generic" vs. the "language-specific" .po files?
(c) Last, but most important to me at this time: Suppose I wanted to
change the hover-text of the "zoom in" button to say "Choose this tool
and click on the map to zoom in" (we have some very un-savvy users!).
What specific steps do I follow to make that change in the recommended
way? My project currently has *no* po folder or files... do I copy them
from <cartowebhome>/po and then modify them? Do I need to run
server2pot.php and client2pot.php to initialize them in some way? I'm
totally lost on how to proceed...
One final detail that adds to my confusion: on my development machine
(WinXP, Apache server) I get message text like "Zoom in" or "Query by
rectangle" when I hover over the tools; when I upload my project to the
live web server (Windows Server, IIS) the tips are the message IDs
instead of the text ("zoomin", "query_by_bbox"). Why do they differ?
Thanks in advance to any of you who can help me understand this! Cheers,
Chris
--
Chris Duncan, Ph.D.
President
GISmatters
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.gismatters.com/
1 Tuckerman Ln
Amherst, MA 01002
Tel: 413-549-2052
Fax: 508-637-2557
_______________________________________________
Cartoweb-users mailing list
Cartoweb-users@lists.maptools.org
http://lists.maptools.org/mailman/listinfo/cartoweb-users
--
Chris Duncan, Ph.D.
President
GISmatters
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.gismatters.com/
1 Tuckerman Ln
Amherst, MA 01002
Tel: 413-549-2052
Fax: 508-637-2557
_______________________________________________
Cartoweb-users mailing list
Cartoweb-users@lists.maptools.org
http://lists.maptools.org/mailman/listinfo/cartoweb-users
