multiligual development

[bhargava]

hi,

I was working on an editor and was exploring the possibility to develop a multilingual editor which supports my rregioanl language besides supporting English.

I want to know as to what I am thinking is possible or not, also what environment, tools and technique is required to support such development.

I am using VB6.0 Enterprise editon, WinNT4.0 SP6 for development.

Pls. suggest.

Regards

Amit Bhargava

 

[sunaj]

Hi,

I think the best solution is to store the text in different languages in string tables in a resource file.
There is a good example at

http://www.vb-helper.com/howtoadv.htm.

Use you browsers search function and look for 'resource' and you'll find it.

Sunaj

 

[chiph]

bhargava -

I think the contents of an editor are pretty easy, since VB6 knows Unicode.

A tougher problem is changing the interface so that one user sees French, and another can see English. The classic Windows way of doing this is writing resource-only DLLs, which you then load dynamically. An equivalent thing in VB would be to write Active-X DLLs that return the language text you need. I would suggest you have a naming convention for the DLL that incorporates the Windows LCID (Locale ID). I know that 1033 is US English and 1036 is French for the French (as opposed to Swiss-French, Belgian-French, etc). There's a chart in MSDN.

Menus are a little tough, though. You'll need to use API calls to build them on the fly, as I don't know of a way to relate a menu stored in a remote resource DLL with an active program. Maybe you can use something like the Active-Bar OCX to build your menus, instead of using the native VB menus.

You might want to limit yourself to languages which are left-to-right, top-to-bottom. Arabic (right-to-left, top-to-bottom, except for numbers) and the Oriental languages (top-to-bottom, left-to-right, although the Japanese seem to be OK with the western style), are very difficult to handle.

Chip H.

 

[rvBasic]

Internationalization with Visual Basic by M. Kaplan (ed. SAMS Publishing)
ISBN: 0672319772 is the best buy you can find for all kinds of international issues using VB.
Consult Table of Contents and read reference chapter at:

http://www.samspublishing.com/detail_sams.cfm?item=0672319772

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In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. [attributed to Yogi Berra]