[vox-tech] Locales and installed languages/charsets (in C)

[Mark K. Kim]

On Fri, 28 May 2004, Ken Bloom wrote:

> I think in general you want a menu that says
> Francais
> Espanol
> English

Hmm... not sure if that's a good idea.  Consider a language like Chinese.
The word "Chinese" in Chinese is not going to appear properly under OS
with no Chinese character support.  It may even print some control
characters that mess up the display (though it's less likely to happen for
toolkits like FLTK), so it's not very desirable to start printing
characters that may not display properly on the screen.

Hopefully, though, if we display all the names of the languages in the
locale in effect, assuming the person using that computer has *some*
knowledge of that locale language in effect, the user should know enough
at least to find the language his/her preference and select it.  But it
would be nice to have the names in English (the "international language")
next to the language names in the locale language, for debugging and
fallback purposes.

Check out the way Google does this.  Go to google, click "preferences",
check "Chinese" in the "Interface Language" section, then click "Save
Settings."  You'll be so confused...!  You don't know how many times I've
had to select "Pig Latin" or "Elmer Fudd" just so I can read "English"
(or "Engwish" in Elmer Fudd!)...  and sometimes it got so bad that I had
to resort to using Google UK...! =P  (As a greater fun, try selecting
"Hewbrew"... ^.^!)

-Mark


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