For my applications (industrial controls man-machine interface) I need
to provide language switching at run-time: Operators with different
mother-language, service engineers coming from another country, factory
tests, etc.
Therefore I've developed a number of custom components, derived from
standard ones, which supply this extra feature. They've been written for
Delphi, and now migrated to Lazarus. The change is minimal, and the
overhead of the added functionality, if not used, is negligible. As an
example the TButton1 component, derived from TButton looks like this:
----
type
TButton1 = class(TButton)
private
{ Private declarations }
FCaption: TCaption; // Standard Language
FTCaption: TCaption; // Translated
protected
{ Protected declarations }
function GetMText: TCaption;
procedure SetMText(const Value: TCaption);
public
{ Public declarations }
procedure Repaint; override;
published
{ Published declarations }
property Caption: TCaption Read GetMText Write SetMText;
end;
implementation
procedure TButton1.SetMText(const Value: TCaption);
begin
if (FCaption <> Value) or (FTCaption = '') then
begin
FCaption := Value;
if Assigned(Trasl) then begin
FTCaption := Trasl.Values[Value];
if FTCaption = '' then FTCaption := Value;
end
else FTCaption := Value;
RealSetText(FTCaption);
end;
end;
procedure TButton1.Repaint;
begin
FTCaption := '';
SetMText(FCaption);
inherited;
end;
function TButton1.GetMText: TCaption;
begin
result := RealGetText;
end;
----
Rather simple and trivial, but it works.
I've been forced to override the Repaint method, to force a new
translation to become effective.
Trasl is a TStringList populated by strings formatted as:
Original_text=Translated_text
loaded with a LoadFromFile method.
Of course it doesn't offer all the features of gettext, but, for GUI
applications that's seldom necessary. In exchange it provides the extra
bonus of making it possible to check and edit translation at run-time.
If this feature isn't of general interest, I could merely contribute a
package containing my custom components, and a few support routines to
load the appropriate language file (taking into account UTF support), to
provide translation for dialogs, to repaint with a different language, etc.
But it's felt that this feature could be added to standard components,
then I could provide patches for standard objects, and to include
support routines. I could also, if deemed interesting, provide support
for translation files in .po format.
BTW: if this feature was included in standard objects, it would make
much easier to check and tune IDE appearance for different languages, by
switching back and forth from English.
What do you think about that?
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