Hi,
On Mon, 24 May 2021 at 21:49, Jerome Shidel wrote:
> Hi Willy,
>
> > On May 24, 2021, at 3:22 PM, Wilhelm Spiegl
> wrote:
> >
> > question about nls, do they all have to be written in the correct
> codepage used by the language / country set in freedos?
> > some time ago i checked and noticed that this is not the fact. they are
> made in different ways, some with windows, some with linux, the result was
> that special
> > characters like äöü or french or spanish accents maybe shown not correct.
> >
> > so first of all, what is the correct handling?
>
> At present, the translations on the Github repository are in a
> “ready-to-use” state that the appropriate program can read without issue.
> They should be in the proper DOS codepage and have the correct line endings
> supported by the program. Occasionally, translators supply versions in
> UTF-8. Generally, the translators seem to prefer working in UTF-8. I assume
> it to prevent character mangling. Anyhow when they supply those, they are
> just kept along side the proper DOS codepage versions. A program that
> imports the latest translations simply ignores all files ending in UTF-8.
>
> Eventually, I’ll provide a better system to convert to/from UTF-8. I know
> there are tools for the conversion. But for now, I rely on the translator
> to provide the final Codepage version.
In addition, I guess a good way to follow is that translated files are
encoded with a codepage suitable for the language, that may be the codepage
that the Installer chooses for that language.
Is this information somewhere available? if it doesn't, I think a simple
table LANG > CODEPAGE would be very useful, so that problems with encoding
can be tracked and users can provide feedback (and make the installation be
faithful to this table). I assume for example that for Spanish, that could
be 858 (Western European + Euro sign) to avoid the problems mentioned by
Wilhelm. This is a simple case (I guess that 858 is suitable for America),
but probably there are cases where language is not enough, and
language+country is required, if the same language is spoken in countries
with quite a different codepage needs.
Aitor
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