Chapter 11. Libraries and Components

89

When two or more '%' directive for formatted output functions such as

printf()

appear in a

message, the order of these '%' directives may be changed by translation. In such a case, the

translator can specify the order. See section of 'Special Comments preceding Keywords' in info

page of

gettext

for detail.

Now there are projects to translate messages in various softwares. For example, Translation Project

(

http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard/po/HTML/

).

11.1.1 Gettext ization of A Software

At first, the software has to have the following lines.

int main(int argc, char **argv)

{

...

setlocale (LC_ALL, "");

/* This is not for gettext but

all i18n software should have

this line. */

bindtextdomain (PACKAGE, LOCALEDIR);

textdomain (PACKAGE);

...

}

where PACKAGE is the name of the catalog file and LOCALEDIR is

 /usr/share/locale 

for

Debian. PACKAGE and LOCALEDIR should be defined in a header file or

Makefile

.

It is convenient to prepare the following header file.

#include 

#define _(String) gettext((String))

and messages in source files should be written as

_( message )

, instead of

 message 

.

Next, catalog files have to be prepared.

At first, a template for catalog file is prepared using

xgettext

. At default a template file

message.po

is prepared.

1

1

I HAVE TO WRITE EXPLANATION.