[Po4a-devel] OS X .strings support

[Nicolas François]

Hello,

On Sat, Apr 03, 2010 at 02:41:40AM -0800, aietkolkhi at gmail.com wrote:
> Hello Nekral,
> 
> Thanks for the quick reply.
> 
> .strings format files are generally used when localizing OS X applications.
> 
> They are UTF-16 (with BOM and Unix line endings) encoded text files that
> include the source and translated strings.
> 
> Here is an example of Alerts.strings file from localization package of an
> application called Cyberduck:
> 
> /* NSButton (Cancel) : <title:Cancel> (oid:9) */
> "Cancel" = "Cancel";

OK, then .strings is yet another translation format as PO, XLIFF or
.properties.

po4a only supports PO files.

> /* NSTextField (Failures) : <title:Failures> (oid:12) */
> "Failures" = "Failures";
> 
> /* NSButton (Network Diagnostics) : <title:Network Diagnostics> (oid:71) */
> "Network Diagnostics" = "Network Diagnostics";
> 
> These sites provide additional information about the strings format:
> 
> 1.
> http://www.wincent.com/a/knowledge-base/archives/2004/11/localization_on.php
> 2.
> https://mailman.research.att.com/pipermail/graphviz-devel/2008/000725.html
> 3. http://www.arizona-software.ch/ilocalize/
> 4. http://www.simultrans.com/articledetail.cfm?PostingID=43
> 5. http://www.bean-osx.com/localization.html
> 
> What kind of information is needed for po4a in order to be able to support
> the format?

You should first define what you would expect from po4a.

The reasons I can imagine are:
 * You have a nice .strings editor, and you want po4a to generate and work
   with .strings files instead of PO files.

 * You want po4a to be able to extract the strings from a .strings and
   generate a PO file, and be able to re-inject translations in the .strings

In both cases, I'm not sure po4a is suitable. A .strings <-> PO
converter would probably be much more useful.

Best Regards,
-- 
Nekral