![\"\"](\"docs\/geowrite\/geowrite_6_localizaion.gif\")
<\/p>\nIn the series about the internals of the geoWrite WYSIWYG text editor for the C64, this article discusses what was required for the German localization.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Localizing an app doesn’t mean just translating all text. Language is just one part of it. Here are all concepts that require changes to geoWrite:<\/p>\n
Let’s go through them.<\/p>\n
Translating the app is not as easy as just translating all strings.<\/p>\n
First, let’s look at what must not<\/strong> be translated:<\/p>\n These are magic filenames that contain the current clipboard\/pasteboard contents. Translating them would break interoperability between apps in different languages.<\/p>\n Then, there are strings where it is up to debate whether they should be translated: geoWrite supports three keywords that get replaced with dynamic contents when used in a page header or footer:<\/p>\n For the German version, these keywords were in fact translated: From the strings that should be translated, let’s start with the straightforward ones: Here is a table of strings that is used in menus:<\/p>\n Care has to be taken that the translated version fits the available space: The translations of “edit” and “options” were abbreviated (“Edit”\/“Editieren”, “Opt”\/“Optionen”), because the whole menu bar would have been too wide otherwise:<\/p>\n For submenus, GEOS programmers have to explicitly state the location and size in pixels, so the definition of a submenu has to change as well:<\/p>\n The German version is wider, so the value for the right border of the menu was updated.<\/p>\n Additionally, all menus in the German version are moved up by one pixel. If you look closely, you can see that the English version has a double line between “file” and “close”, while the German version has a single line. The symbol In the case of dialogs, the translated text might not fit into the same number of lines and might require a re-layout:<\/p>\n So while the English version just consists of one line of text, the German version adds a Because of word order differences, the startup dialog needed a complete redesign…<\/p>\n …which required changing the locations of all text and icons in the dialog’s definition:<\/p>\n The startup dialog contains buttons that say “Create”, “Open” and “Quit”. GEOS only provides a limited set of predefined buttons (“OK”, “Cancel”, “Open”, …), so the pixel images of “Create” and “Quit” are supplied by the app and need to be translated as well.<\/p>\n The translated words are longer, so the buttons have to be bigger as well.<\/p>\n As discussed in part 1<\/a> of this series, GEOS uses a custom system to save and recover screen contents that get overwritten by menus and dialogs. Since the sizes and positions of the menus are different, the rectangles that need to be recovered are changed in their table as well:<\/p>\n Different cultures\/languages use different conventions for the date and time format. The For the German version, it uses the German format, with German month names:<\/p>\n This is the core function to create the date string:<\/p>\n The month and day are reversed in the two different formats. The “.” vs. the “,” after the day gets handled by the function The function to create the time string has some extra logic to convert the hour (0-23) to the range (1-12):<\/p>\n And at the end, there is extra code in the US version to add “AM” or “PM”:<\/p>\n The character used for the decimal separator may differ between languages \u2013 “3.14” in an English text would be “3,14” in a German text. Since geoWrite supports “decimal” tab stops that align numbers around the decimal separator, it needs to scan for this character: The English version checks for “.”, while the German version checks for “,”.<\/p>\n The German language has four extra letters, the umlauts: “\u00e4”\/“\u00c4”, “\u00f6”\/“\u00d6”, “\u00fc”\/“\u00dc” and “\u00df”.<\/p>\n Until the advent of Unicode, operating systems used different character encodings for different languages or scripts.<\/p>\n The English version of GEOS uses the 7 bit ASCII encoding, which contains the 26 letters A through Z, but no umlauts. The GEOS KERNAL has no context of a character encoding, it just blindly draws glyphs that are stored at an index in a font \u2013 as long as the index is between 32 and 127, the 7-bit ASCII printable range. The only difference between the English and the German operating system in terms of character encoding are the fonts: Just like the regular fonts, the fonts that come with the German version have 96 characters, but some characters have been replaced by the extra umlauts and the ‘\u00a7’ character (important for legal documents). These are the variants of the system font “BSW\/9”:<\/p>\nfn_textscrap:\n .byte \"Text Scrap\",0\nfn_photoscrap:\n .byte \"Photo Scrap\",0\n<\/code><\/pre>\nKeywords<\/h3>\n
\n
DATE<\/code>: inserts the current date<\/li>\nTIME<\/code>: inserts the current time<\/li>\nPAGE<\/code>: inserts the current page number<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nDATUM<\/code>, ZEIT<\/code>, SEITE<\/code>.<\/p>\nStrings<\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"docs\/geowrite\/geowrite_6_diff0.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"docs\/geowrite\/geowrite_6_menubar.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"docs\/geowrite\/geowrite_6_menu_en.png\")
\n![\"\"](\"docs\/geowrite\/geowrite_6_menu_de.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"docs\/geowrite\/geowrite_6_diff0a.png\")
<\/p>\nMENU_HEIGHT<\/code> in the previous code block is 15 for the English version and 14 for the German version. It is unknown what the purpose of this is.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"docs\/geowrite\/geowrite_6_dialog1_en.png\")
\n![\"\"](\"docs\/geowrite\/geowrite_6_dialog1_de.png\")
<\/p>\nGOTOXY<\/code> control code to move the cursor to the second line:<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"docs\/geowrite\/geowrite_6_diff1.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"docs\/geowrite\/geowrite_6_dialog2_en.png\")
\n![\"\"](\"docs\/geowrite\/geowrite_6_dialog2_de.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"docs\/geowrite\/geowrite_6_diff2.png\")
<\/p>\nImages<\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"docs\/geowrite\/geowrite_6_buttons.png\")
<\/p>\nScreen Recovery Rectangles<\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"docs\/geowrite\/geowrite_6_diff3.png\")
<\/p>\nDate\/Time Format<\/h2>\n
DATE<\/code> and TIME<\/code> keywords stamp the current date and time into a page’s header or footer. For the English version, it uses the US format for dates and times:<\/p>\nDecember 31, 1999 11:59 PM\n<\/code><\/pre>\n31. Dezember 1999 23:59\n<\/code><\/pre>\n ; date\n LoadW r0, dateString\n.if DATE_FORMAT=DATE_FORMAT_US\n jsr getMonthName\n jsr getDay\n.elseif DATE_FORMAT=DATE_FORMAT_DE\n jsr getDay\n jsr getMonthName\n.endif\n jsr getYear\n<\/code><\/pre>\ngetDay<\/code>:<\/p>\ngetDay:\n MoveB day, r3L\n LoadB r3H, 0\n jsr byteToDecimal\n ldy #0\n.if DATE_FORMAT=DATE_FORMAT_US\n lda #','\n.elseif DATE_FORMAT=DATE_FORMAT_DE\n lda #'.'\n.endif\n sta (r0),y\n IncW r0\n lda #' '\n sta (r0),y\n IncW r0\n rts\n<\/code><\/pre>\n lda hour\n.if DATE_FORMAT=DATE_FORMAT_US ; AM\/PM\n cmp #12\n bcc :+ ; >= 12?\n sub #12 ; then subtract 12\n: cmp #0\n bne :+ ; == 0\n lda #12 ; then it's 12\n:\n.endif\n sta r3L\n LoadB r3H, 0\n\n jsr byteToDecimal ; hours\n ldy #0\n lda #':'\n sta (r0),y ; ':'\n IncW r0\n\n lda minutes\n sta r3L\n LoadB r3H, 0\n lda #1\n jsr byteToDecimal ; minutes\n<\/code><\/pre>\n ldy #0\n lda #' '\n sta (r0),y ; space\n IncW r0\n\n.if DATE_FORMAT=DATE_FORMAT_US ; AM\/PM\n lda #'A'\n ldx hour\n cpx #12\n bcc :+\n lda #'P'\n: sta (r0),y\n IncW r0\n lda #'M'\n sta (r0),y\n IncW r0\n.endif\n<\/code><\/pre>\nNumber Format<\/h2>\n
Character Set & Encoding<\/h2>\n
GEOS Character Encoding<\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"docs\/geowrite\/bsw9.png\")
\n![\"\"](\"docs\/geowrite\/bsw9_de.png\")
<\/p>\n