At 12:00am -0700 00-10-04, Palm Developer Forum digest wrote:
>Subject: Chinese tools
>From: Shannon Pekary <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Date: Tue, 03 Oct 2000 12:17:27 -0700
>X-Message-Number: 43
>
>I would like to create a chinese version of a product, but I am
>confused about how to do that. I understand there are add-ons that can
>allow the Palm to display Big-5 characters, and I can get resources
>translated.
>
>The thing that I am worried about is whether the PalmRez Post Linker
>can handle it. I see settings for Palm OS 3.1 and later, as well as
>Japanese, but no Chinese or other languages.
>
>How would I go about feeding other languages through the Post Linker,
>or should I give up and figure out some way to do stick in resources
>after the Post Linking step?
I don't know of a good way currently to solve this problem. PalmRez
only "knows" about the Latin and Shift-JIS encodings, and there's no
way to extend it automatically for a new encoding such as Big-5.
Also, there's the issue of needing to correctly calculate the widths
of some UI elements such as menus, which means that PalmRez also has
to know how to measure the width of text. Currently it handles this
for Shift-JIS by using fonts found in the "PalmRez Japanese Support"
file, but no such file exists for Big-5.
So what to do? Hmm, if the Chinese (double-byte) characters in the
add-ons have the same width as Japanese characters, then I'd replace
each double-byte character with a generic Japanese character (e.g.
0x8140) in the .rsrc file, and select Japanese as the target for
PalmRez. Then I'd use a hex editor to edit the resulting PRC,
replacing 0x8140 sequences with the real character codes - hopefully
there wouldn't be tons of text. Sounds painful though.
-- Ken
Ken Krugler
TransPac Software, Inc.
<http://www.transpac.com>
+1 530-470-9200
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