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Contributing

How to provide translations

First, you need to know your language code according to ISO 639-1.

For English, this is, for example, en, for German, it is de.

NOTE: The procedure described below is greatly simplified if you create a language pack based on the nv_xx template and use the tools provided for this purpose.

Create a message catalog

A "message catalog" is a dictionary for mdnovel's messages and menu entries.

For creating a message catalog, you download a template with all English messages from here.

Rename messages.pot to <your language code>.po, then give some specific information in the header data by modifying the following lines:

"PO-Revision-Date: YEAR-MO-DA HO:MI+ZONE\n"
"Last-Translator: FULL NAME <EMAIL@ADDRESS>\n"
"Language: LANGUAGE\n"

NOTE: Be sure to use a text editor that writes utf-8 encoded text. Otherwise, it may not work with non-ASCII characters used in your language.

The <your language code>.po dictionary is organized as a set of message ID (msgid) - message string (msgstr) pairs, where msgid means the English term, and msgstr means the translated term. This is an example for such a pair where the message string is still missing:

msgid "Cannot overwrite file"
msgstr ""

Now you enter all missing message strings.

  • If a message ID contains placeholders like {}, be sure to put them also into the message string.
  • If a message ID starts with !, the message string must also start with !.

Before you distribute your translations, you can convert and install the message catalog for testing.

Convert the message catalog to binary format

The application needs the message catalog in binary format. This is easily achieved using the msgfmt.py converter script. You find it in your Python installation, in the Tools/i18n subdirectory. If not, you can download the code from here

Name the binary file mdnovel.mo.

Install your translation for testing

Add a subdirectory tree to .novx/locale, and place mdnovel.mo there, like this:

<your home directory>
└── .mdnovel/
    └── locale/
        └─ <language code>/
           └─ LC_MESSAGES/
              └─ mdnovel.mo

Then start mdnovel and see whether your translation works.

NOTE: At startup, mdnovel tries to load a message dictionary that fits to the system language. If it doesn't find a matching language code in the locale directory, it uses English as default language.

HINT: mdnovel comes with German translations. Look at the de directory tree, if you need an example.

Contribute your translations

If mdnovel works fine with your translations, you can consider contributing it.

An easy way may be to put a posting in the mdnovel forum, appending your <your language code>.po file.

Development

mdnovel depends on the apptk library which must be present in your file system. mdnovel is organized as an Eclipse PyDev project. The official release branch on GitHub is main.

Mandatory directory structure for building the application package

.
└── mdnovel/
    ├── i18n/
    ├── src/
    └── tools/ 
        ├── build.py
        ├── inliner.py
        ├── msgfmt.py
        ├── package_builder.py
        ├── pgettext.py
        ├── translate_de.py
        └── translations.py

Conventions

See https://github.com/peter88213/novxlib/blob/main/docs/conventions.md

Development tools

  • Python version 3.12.
  • build.py starts the building and packaging process.

Optional IDE

  • Eclipse IDE with PyDev and EGit.
  • Apache Ant can be used for starting the build.py script.