the preference and string mechanism haven't "aged" enough to
have a tech note on them yet. and we haven't written the "options"
dialog yet.
but, for a quick peek at what is going on:
[1] launch and exit AbiWord. this will create a new
preferences file.
on unix, the prefs file will be in ~/.abiword
on win32, the prefs file will be in \abiword.txt
(the location and names of the files on win32 will probably
change -- the concept of a "home" directory on Win95/98/NT
is, well, just a little.... broken/strange....)
[2] edit this file and change both occurrences of '_builtin_'
to 'custom'. (we have the notion of multiple sets of
preferences (or schemes) between which you'll be able to
switch. the scheme _builtin_ is special and is written
to the file as a reference only.)
[3] you can change any of the name=value pairs. some of them
don't have any other values yet (like the MenuLayouts or
the MenuLabelSet or ToolbarLabelSet) but others do. for
example, you can change RulerUnits to either "in", "cm",
"pi" or "pt" (we considered adding Angstroms, but didn't :-)
[4] anyway, experiment and relaunch AbiWord. (the next time you
exit AbiWord, the file will be updated -- you'll have your
'custom' scheme and another copy of '_builtin_')
step [1] also created a "translate-me" strings file
containing the builtin EnUS strings. These are used for
dialogs and message boxes. In 0.5.2, only the main message
boxes in ap_EditMethods.cpp got converted from the hard-coded
strings.
on unix, this file is /tmp/EnUS.strings
on win32, this file is EnUS.strings and is in the current directory.
this file is a "translate-me" file. to translate:
[5] rename the file base name. edit the file and change
the value of 'language=' to match the new base name.
supply a new translation for each of the strings in
the body of the <strings...> tag.
keep in mind that this file is just getting started.
there will be a lot more strings in this file as we
get all of the dialogs and other message boxes converted.
[6] place the new file in the directory named in the preferences
file (see {Unix,Win}StringSetDirectory="...")
since the 0.5.2 tarball is a few hours old, the live CVS tree
contains a more up-to-date set of strings :-)
(i converted the unix MoreWindows dialog to use the new
mechanism right after the tarball was built.)
well, that should get you started. if you want to dive into
code or have additional questions, please don't hesitate to ask.
> > 3. Shaw got in some more improvements to the Word importer, and handed it
> > off to Justin, who's working on a cleaner implementation. (Just say no to
> > dual-importer strategies which do memory-intensive tricks with XML buffers.)
> Especially this. I wanted to test various word97 documents I have floating
> around here to see how it is...
the word97 importer in 0.5.2 is ***much*** improved from
what it was in 0.5.1. it's all in the tree -- you shouldn't
have to do anything special to get it to work. (the version
that Justin and Shaw are working is more of a rewrite and
will be a little while...)
hope this helps,
jeff