README.i18n

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
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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 SVN tree at:
  l10n-kde4/<lang>/data/kdeedu/kstars/info_url.dat (where <lang> 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).