This is a collection of old localization techniques used by FreeCAD in the past. They show some of the internals of the processs, but the techniques on the Localisation page should be used from now on.
The following information doesn't need to be used anymore and will likely become obsolete. It is being kept here so that programmers may familiarize themselves with how it works. -
Available translation files
To localise your application module your need to helpers that come with Qt. You can download them from the Trolltech-Website, but they are also contained in the LibPack:
To start the localisation of your project go to the GUI-Part of you module and type on the command line:
qmake -project
This scans your project directory for files containing text strings and creates a project file like the following example:
######################################################################
# Automatically generated by qmake (1.06c) Do 2. Nov 14:44:21 2006
######################################################################
TEMPLATE = app
DEPENDPATH += .\Icons
INCLUDEPATH += .
# Input
HEADERS += ViewProvider.h Workbench.h
SOURCES += AppMyModGui.cpp \
Command.cpp \
ViewProvider.cpp \
Workbench.cpp
TRANSLATIONS += MyMod_de.ts
You can manually add files here. The section TRANSLATIONS contains a list of files with the translation for each language. In the above example MyMod_de.ts is the german translation.
Now you need to run lupdate to extract all string literals in your GUI. Running lupdate after changes in the source code is allways safe since it never deletes strings from your translations files. It only adds new strings.
Now you need to add the .ts-files to your VisualStudio project. Specifiy the following custom build method for them:
python ..\..\..\Tools\qembed.py "$(InputDir)\$(InputName).ts"
"$(InputDir)\$(InputName).h" "$(InputName)"
Note: Enter this in one command line, the line break is only for layout purpose.
By compiling the .ts-file of the above example, a header file MyMod_de.h is created. The best place to include this is in App<Modul>Gui.cpp. In our example this would be AppMyModGui.cpp. There you add the line
new Gui::LanguageProducer("Deutsch", <Modul>_de_h_data, <Modul>_de_h_len);
to publish your translation in the application.
To ease localization for the py files you can use the tool "pylupdate4" which accepts one or more py files. With the -ts option you can prepare/update one or more .ts files. For instance to prepare a .ts file for French simply enter into the command line:
pylupdate4 *.py -ts YourModule_fr.ts
the pylupdate tool will scan your .py files for translate() or tr() functions and create a YourModule_fr.ts file. That file can the be translated with QLinguist and a YourModule_fr.qm file produced from QLinguist or with the command
lrelease YourModule_fr.ts
Beware that the pylupdate4 tool is not very good at recognizing translate() functions, they need to be formatted very specifically ( see the Draft module files for examples). Inside your file, you can then setup a translator like this (after loading your QApplication but BEFORE creating any qt widget):
translator = QtCore.QTranslator()
translator.load("YourModule_"+languages[ln])
QtGui.QApplication.installTranslator(translator)
Optionally, you can also create the file XML Draft.qrc with this content:
<RCC> <qresource prefix="/translations" > <file>Draft_fr.qm</file> </qresource> </RCC>
and running pyrcc4 Draft.qrc -o qrc_Draft.py creates a big Python containing all resources. BTW this approach also works to put icon files in one resource file