Luz should be translatable

[Pierre Slamich]

Luz should be translatable via Launchpad.
And I'd be glad to contribute the French translation.

[Ian McIntosh (ian-mcintosh)]

I agree!

Does anyone want to take on the project of making Luz translatable?

I don't know what it would take-- adding something to the source code, and doing something with the .glade file?

[Rafał Cieślak (rafalcieslak256)]

Basically, gettext is a great choice, common amongst many projects.

In a nutshell, the whole process looks like this:
1. You add some declarations and set up some variables in the Makefiles/Rakefiles
2. Add a macro to every translatable string, f.e change: message = "Hello world!" into: message = _("Hello world!")
3. Run xgettext or it's ruby equivalent, which is a tool that extracts strings from these macros into a .pot file
4. You import the pot file into Launchpad
5. Wait until people translate it and fetch a set of localised .po files Launchpad will generate for you
6. Run some post-processing macros to compile these .po files into .gmo format.

And basically, that's all, Luz should now run using your system language.

I would love to help making Luz translatable, as I have some experience with gettext, but I do not know a word in Ruby and getting through your code without being fluent with Ruby would be a real trouble for me. Moreover, there are some differences in the overall logic between C++ and Ruby, and I am not sure I understand the Rakefiles. Maybe one day I will try harder, but as for now, with my little knowledge of Ruby I am unable to help you making it translatable, although I'd love to help.

I found a guide that may be useful.
http://www.digitale-wertschoepfung.de/artikel/gettext/gettext.html
Basing on that it seems that shouldn't be much work for someone who knows Ruby well, but that's just my impression.

In case of any further questions concerning gettext, feel free to ask me, I will try to help as much as I can.
And, of course, I could contribute a translation - I'm a polish native speaker:)

[Ian McIntosh (ian-mcintosh)]

Thank Rafal!

I've started this process for ScreenRuler, another Ruby-Gtk project of mine. Once that's working I'll attempt it for Luz Studio.