aee.i18n.guide

Another Easy Editor ("aee") provides the ability to translate the 
messages displayed to the user and the commands entered.  This is done 
via message catalogs, following X/Open standards.  aee supports eight 
bit characters.  The contents of this file apply to both 'aee' and 
'xae' (an X-Windows version of aee).

(The name aee.i18n.guide is for "aee internationalization guide".  The 
i18n abbreviation is used because there are 18 characters between the 
first letter ("i") and last ("n") of "internationalization".) 

All of the messages, warnings, information, and commands, are contained 
in the message catalog.  Each numbered entry represents an individual 
string used by aee.  Some strings contain formatting information for 
formatted print statements, which are of the form "%s", or "%d", these 
must be preserved in the translation, or the correct information will not 
be displayed.  For those strings containing multiple formatting codes, 
the order of each item must be preserved as well. 

Care should be taken when translating commands and initialization keywords 
because the algorithm used for detecting uniqueness of entered commands 
will not be able to distinguish words that are not unique before the end 
of the shorter word, for example, it would not be able to distinguish the 
command 'abcd' from 'abcde'.

After translating the messages, use the 'gencat' command to create the 
compiled catalog used when running the software.  The standard syntax 
would be: 

	gencat aee.cat aee.msg

Where aee.msg is the file containing the translations, and aee.cat is the 
compiled catalog.  If the file aee.cat does not exist, it will be created.  
Check the documentation for your system for proper syntax.  

Message catalog placement varies from system to system.  A common location 
for message catalogs is in /usr/lib/nls.  In this directory are 
directories with the names of other languages.  The default language is 
'C'.  There is also an environment variable, named NLSPATH used to 
determine where message catalogs can be found.  This variable is similar 
to the PATH variable used for commands, but with some differences.  The 
NLSPATH variable must have the ability to handle different names for 
languages and the catalog files, so it has field descriptors for these.  A 
typical setting for NLSPATH could be:

	NLSPATH=/usr/lib/nls/%L/%N.cat:/usr/local/lib/nls/%L/%N.cat

Where "%L" is the field descriptor for the language (obtained from the 
LANG environment variable) and "%N" is the name of the file (with the 
".cat" appended by the path variable, it is not passed from the requesting 
program).  The colon (:) is used to separate paths, so in the above 
example there are two paths possible for message catalogs.  You may wish 
to maintain catalogs for applications that are not supported by your 
system vendor in a location unique for you, and this is facilitated by the 
NLSPATH variable.  Remember to set and export both the LANG and NLSPATH 
variables for each user that expects to use localization either in a 
system-wide profile or in each user's profile.  See your system 
documentation for more information.

The message catalog supplied with aee also uses the '$quote' directive to 
specify a quote around strings to ensure proper padding.  This directive 
may not be supported on all systems, and lead to quotes being included in 
the string used in aee, which will cause incorrect behavior.  If the 
'$quote' directive is not supported by your system's gencat command, edit 
the msg file to remove the leading and trailing quotation marks.

The file 'catalog.aee' contains the message catalog for aee.  The 
shell script 'genstr' is used to generate the catalog.  The input file 
for genstr is localize.c, which initializes the strings for aee and xae.