\section{Writing non-English applications}\label{nonenglishoverview}
This article describes how to write applications that communicate with
-user in language other than English. Unfortunately many languages use
+the user in a language other than English. Unfortunately many languages use
different charsets under Unix and Windows (and other platforms, to make
-situation even more complicated). These charsets usually differ in so
-many characters it is impossible to use same texts under all platforms.
+the situation even more complicated). These charsets usually differ in so
+many characters that it is impossible to use the same texts under all
+platforms.
-wxWindows library provides mechanism that helps you avoid distributing many
+The wxWidgets library provides a mechanism that helps you avoid distributing many
identical, only differently encoded, packages with your application
(e.g. help files and menu items in iso8859-13 and windows-1257). Thanks
to this mechanism you can, for example, distribute only iso8859-13 data
(Make sure that the header is {\bf not} marked as {\it fuzzy}.)
-wxWindows is able to use this catalog under any supported platform
+wxWidgets is able to use this catalog under any supported platform
(although iso8859-2 is a Unix encoding and is normally not understood by
Windows).
How is this done? When you tell the wxLocale class to load a message catalog that
-contains correct header, it checks the charset. The catalog is then converted
+contains a correct header, it checks the charset. The catalog is then converted
to the charset used (see
\helpref{wxLocale::GetSystemEncoding}{wxlocalegetsystemencoding} and
\helpref{wxLocale::GetSystemEncodingName}{wxlocalegetsystemencodingname}) by
-user's operating system. This is default behaviour of the
+the user's operating system. This is the default behaviour of the
\helpref{wxLocale}{wxlocale} class; you can disable it by {\bf not} passing
{\tt wxLOCALE\_CONV\_ENCODING} to \helpref{wxLocale::Init}{wxlocaleinit}.
+\wxheading{Non-English strings or 8-bit characters in the source code}
+
+By convention, you should only use characters without diacritics (i.e. 7-bit
+ASCII strings) for msgids in the source code and write them in English.
+
+If you port software to wxWindows, you may be confronted with legacy source
+code containing non-English string literals. Instead of translating the strings
+in the source code to English and putting the original strings into message
+catalog, you may configure wxWidgets to use non-English msgids and translate to
+English using message catalogs:
+
+\begin{enumerate}
+\item{If you use the program {\tt xgettext} to extract the strings from
+the source code, specify the option {\tt --from-code=<source code charset>}.}
+\item{Specify the source code language and charset as arguments to
+\helpref{wxLocale::AddCatalog}{wxlocaleaddcatalog}. For example:
+\begin{verbatim}
+locale.AddCatalog(_T("myapp"),
+ wxLANGUAGE_GERMAN, _T("iso-8859-1"));
+\end{verbatim}
+}
+\end{enumerate}
+
\wxheading{Font mapping}
-You can use \helpref{wxEncodingConverter}{wxencodingconverter} and
+You can use \helpref{wxMBConv classes}{mbconvclasses} and
\helpref{wxFontMapper}{wxfontmapper} to display text:
\begin{verbatim}
if (!wxFontMapper::Get()->IsEncodingAvailable(enc, facename))
{
wxFontEncoding alternative;
- if (wxTheFontMapper->GetAltForEncoding(enc, &alternative,
- facename, false))
+ if (wxFontMapper::Get()->GetAltForEncoding(enc, &alternative,
+ facename, false))
{
- wxEncodingConverted encconv;
- if (!encconv.Init(enc, alternative))
- ...failure...
- else
- text = encconv.Convert(text);
+ wxCSConv convFrom(wxFontMapper::Get()->GetEncodingName(enc));
+ wxCSConv convTo(wxFontMapper::Get()->GetEncodingName(alternative));
+ text = wxString(text.mb_str(convFrom), convTo);
}
else
- ...failure...
+ ...failure (or we may try iso8859-1/7bit ASCII)...
}
...display text...
\end{verbatim}
\wxheading{Converting data}
You may want to store all program data (created documents etc.) in
-the same encoding, let's say windows1250. Obviously, the best way would
-be to use \helpref{wxEncodingConverter}{wxencodingconverter}.
+the same encoding, let's say {\tt utf-8}. You can use
+\helpref{wxCSConv}{wxcsconv} class to convert data to the encoding used by the
+system your application is running on (see
+\helpref{wxLocale::GetSystemEncoding}{wxlocalegetsystemencoding}).
\wxheading{Help files}
If you're using \helpref{wxHtmlHelpController}{wxhtmlhelpcontroller} there is
-no problem at all. You must only make sure that all the HTML files contain
+no problem at all. You only need to make sure that all the HTML files contain
the META tag, e.g.
\begin{verbatim}