README.i18n: Instructions for Translating KStars copyright 2002 by Jason Harris and the KStars team. This document is licensed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Some parts of i18n in KStars are a bit complicated, so we provide this document to answer some questions you might have. + Strings in data files. KStars has many data files that contain strings that you may want to translate: cities.dat, cnames.dat, image_url.dat, info_url.dat We have modified our Makefile to automatically parse these files and generate a "dummy" source file that only contains the translatable strings from our data files. The file is called "kstars-i18n.cpp". Once the kstars.pot file is generated, this file is destroyed. The advantage to this is that it requires no special effort on the part of the translation teams; the data file strings are automatically added to our POT file. The disadvantage is that our POT file is now quite large! Especially because of the city names. Probably, most of the city names won't need to be translated. We added a comment to these strings indicating that they are optional. cnames.dat contains constellation names, in Latin. We include an option in the program to display "Localized" names instead of Latin names; if you want this to work for your language, you'll need to provide translations for the strings in the POT file which have a comment like: "Constellation name (optional)". + Alternate internet URL lists KStars provides many internet links to images and information on specific objects in the sky. The links appear in an object's right-click popup menu. The POT file already provides the link text for translation, but there's still a problem: the websites that the links go to are all in English! If you want to provide internet links that point to websites in your native language, you can. Add a file to the CVS tree at: kde-i18n//data/kdeedu/kstars/info_url.dat (where is the two-letter code for your language). This file should contain the list of internet links you want KStars to use when localized for your language. You can look at the default info_url.dat to figure out the file format; briefly, it's a colon-delimited line with fields: object name, link text, link URL Note that your alternate info_url.dat file will completely replace the default, so if you want to include some links from the original, you will need to copy them over. Some of the sites we link to provide versions of their pages in other languages (e.g., seds.org). So for these sites, you can just modify the URLs from the default file. (you can also provide a localized version of image_url.dat, but this is probably unnecessary since these are only image links).