How to translate your own fpGUI-based applications
--------------------------------------------------

1) Decide on your default language. If it is not English, then you can
   toggle fpGUI's default language too - this is optional though.
   If you do want to change fpGUI's default language, then edit the
   fpg_constants.pas unit, and enable the language define for the
   language you want. fpGUI supports 8 languages out of the box.
   Then simply recompile fpGUI.

2) Now for your application. Simply create a myconstants.pas unit
   where you define all your applications resource strings.

   eg:
   resourcestring
     rsErrMessage = 'Some error occurred';

   It is not mandatory to use a single resource string unit, but it
   does make your life a whole lot easier.

3) When compiling your project FPC would have created a myconstants.rst
   file. A compiled resource string unit.

4) Now use FPC's 'rstconv' tool to convert that to a standard .po file,
   which can be edited by many freely available PO tools.
   eg: gtranslator, poedit, KBabel etc.

     rstconv -i myconstants.rst -o <appname>.en.po

   For your application translation, fpGUI is coded to look for *.po
   files with the following naming format.

            <appname>.<lang>.po

   where <lang> is the international 2 character language code.

5) If you have other language .po translation files, they need to
   periodically be updated with the latest resource string amendments.
   fpGUI includes such a tool at: <fpgui>/tools/updatepofiles.pas

   Compile this tool, and run it by passing the latest *.po file to it
   as the only parameter. The 'updatepofiles' tool will then search for
   all other *.po files in the same directory as the one passed in on
   the command line. It will then update those other *.po files with the
   latest resource string changes.

   eg:   updatepofiles languages/<appname>.po

6) Now use any PO Editor to translate the various <myapp>.<lang>.po
   files.



Summary
-------
So in summary, when you deploy your application, you will have the
following files to distribute. For example:

    myapp                -  executable (compiled for default English)
    myapp.af.po          -  application translation for Afrikaans
    myapp.ru.po          -  application translation for Russian
    fpgui.af.po          -  fpGUI translation for Afrikaans
    fpgui.ru.po          -  fpGUI translation for Russian


When the application is run under Windows, it will automatically query
the region information to find the language to use. Under Linux (*nix)
it will look at the LANG environment variable.

For example: say you want to force the above application to start up in
Afrikaans under Linux, you can do the following in a terminal window.

   export LANG=af_ZA.UTF-8
   ./myapp


For my applications I put together a simple console application (a
shell/batch script will do as well) that runs all the above commands for
me. So keeping my .po files up to date is a simple one line command.


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