Shannon,
>I need some help localizing applications to Japanese. The new docs describe
>all the gory details of internal string representation, but I didn't see
>any discussion of tools to use and how to actually build the thing.
>
>For the Palm guys: What are the tools you used and the process you went
>through to create the localized applications in the Japanese WorkPad?
1. Localization was done using ResEdit and either AppleGlot or PowerGlot.
2. You need a special version of PalmRez to correctly handle calculation of
text widths (primarily for menus).
3. We didn't use Constructor, because it didn't work correctly with Japanese.
4. The localized data can be stored in either resource (.rsrc) files or Rez
(.r) files.
5. 99% of the characters are the same between the PalmSJIS and MacSJIS
character sets. The deltas, such as I remember them, are (a) PalmSJIS
contains some special characters in the control range (0x14...0x19) (b)
MacSJIS contains some special characters in the high ascii (0x80, 0xa0,
0xfd...0xff) range, (c) PalmSJIS contains the extended Microsoft (from code
page 932) double-byte characters, and (d) MacSJIS contains Apple's
extensions to the JIS character set.
Which means that if you use English System 8.5 and add in the Japanese
Language Kit, then use the Language Kit Registration app to tag ResEdit as
being 'Japanese', you can view & edit resources containing Japanese text.
6. I believe that JOS used PalmLatin (pre 3.1) fonts for the low-ascii
(0...127) characters, and standard JIS for the high ascii (single-byte
katakana) and double-byte characters. Which means that if you're going from
JOS to PalmSJIS, you shouldn't need to do any special translation.
One side note, though, is that I believe JOS used narrower double-byte
characters than PalmSJIS, thus any app built for JOS with a localized UI
might need to be rebuilt using (an appropriate version of) PalmRez to get
the menu widths set correctly.
7. When dealing with localizers, I think the three most common approachs
are (a) use a tool such as PowerGlot, (b) teach the localizers how to use
ResEdit, (c) dump the data as Rez-format .r text files and hope that the
localizers don't mess up the format, or (d) extract the text strings from
the .r file yourself, and send them off to the localizer.
If there isn't much text, then (d) is reasonable, otherwise I'd use
PowerGlot and/or ResEdit.
-- Ken
Ken Krugler
TransPac Software, Inc.
<http://www.transpac.com>
+1 650-947-9222 (direct) +1 408-261-7550 (main)
