Tony, Is your interface quite static, or dynamic? And does it involve a lot of forms and/or text? I've spent a bunch of time creating the infrastructure for a localizable dynamic interface, so I can give a few pointers there:
* Spend time creating a library of functions which you can use to localize interface objects (i.e. controls, fields, labels, etc.) on-the-fly. * Consider using WinDraw functions (e.g. WinDrawChars) instead of labels... but keep in mind that any draw functions need to happen after FrmDrawForm is called (whereas other objects like buttons are localized before FrmDrawForm). * Always allow more space than you would need for English text, and consider building truncation into the localization functions (e.g. we always check how many chars will fit, and if the text is too long we append an ellipsis (...) to the truncated string. * Dynamic menus are tricky to localize, since there are limited ways to control menus at run-time. We found that we needed to create one static item on the menu bar (we used our App name and made it our "about" menu), then add the localized text at run-time. In other words, as far as I know you can't localize the first item on a menu at run-time. * If you can store your strings in a database rather than hardcoding them, it will allow you to easily add other languages later on. We use a record structure that simply has a Text ID, a Locale code, and the string... then we lookup by Text ID at run-time, based on the currently selected locale. It works really well and we're able to maintain the database in an Excel spreadsheet and simply generate our localization PDB on the Windows side (can't remember what tool we use to creat the PDB, but there is plenty of documentation in this forum about creating PDBs in Windows). If your UI is quite static and simple, there are easier ways to localize. But if you want an app that can be easily localized I'd suggest considering dynamic UI. Cheers, Mark Cameron Techneos Systems Inc. -----Original Message----- From: Tony Janke [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, May 09, 2005 9:54 AM To: Palm Developer Forum Subject: multi-language support I am writing an application that will be sold worldwide. What is the level of difficulty to have the GUI/interface translated into different languages? thanks, ~Tony -- For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/ -- For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/
