| 1 | ============================================================================ |
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| 2 | Internationalization in PennMUSH |
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| 3 | ============================================================================ |
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| 4 | |
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| 5 | PennMUSH 1.7.3 and later have extensive support for running in non-English |
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| 6 | environments. There are two parts to this. First, what the mush considers |
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| 7 | to be valid characters, what's upper-case, what's lower-case, how they |
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| 8 | are sorted, and so on. The second is translating the messages produced |
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| 9 | by the game into another language. (Helpfiles aren't currently translated.) |
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| 10 | |
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| 11 | Several languages are currently supported to one degree or another. |
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| 12 | If your favorite language isn't (or if you want to increase the |
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| 13 | level of support), and you're fluent in it, you can help out! |
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| 14 | See http://www.pennmush.org/translation.html. |
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| 15 | |
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| 16 | Localization (the process of making a MUSH conform to a given "locale") |
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| 17 | is controlled by the LANG or LC_ALL environment variables, which have |
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| 18 | the form "la_DI", where la is a language code and DI is a dialect. For |
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| 19 | example, "en_US" stands for English, United States dialect. The |
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| 20 | language codes are usually the same as a country's top level domain in |
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| 21 | URLs. Spanish is 'es', Russian is 'ru', and so on. |
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| 22 | |
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| 23 | There are two places where you have to use LANG: when you're |
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| 24 | compiling the MUSH (in order to compile the message translation files) |
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| 25 | and when you start up the MUSH (in order to set the locale for |
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| 26 | the running server). |
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| 27 | |
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| 28 | 1. Compiling the MUSH - tips |
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| 29 | |
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| 30 | Files with translated messages are located at |
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| 31 | http://download.pennmush.org/Source/translations/. Get the one for your |
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| 32 | patchlevel and language, put it in your pennmush/po/ directory. |
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| 33 | |
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| 34 | These files have to be compiled to an efficient internal form before |
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| 35 | starting up the mush. This means you should set your LANG environment |
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| 36 | variable before you compile your server. |
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| 37 | |
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| 38 | To do this using the common bash shell, 'export LANG=en_US', or whatever |
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| 39 | your setting is. If that gives an error, try the tcsh shell form 'setenv |
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| 40 | LANG en_US'. If that still doesn't work, consult the documentation for |
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| 41 | the shell you're using. |
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| 42 | |
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| 43 | The message files are compiled during the "make install" step. |
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| 44 | |
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| 45 | Be sure that you compile with a COMPRESSION_TYPE (in options.h) that |
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| 46 | is 8-bit clean so it will work properly with non-ASCII characters. |
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| 47 | |
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| 48 | 2. Starting up the MUSH - tips |
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| 49 | |
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| 50 | The LANG environment variable that controls what language the mush |
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| 51 | uses is normally set in the pennmush/game/restart script. There's an |
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| 52 | example for using French in the script already that can be used as a |
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| 53 | starting point. |
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| 54 | |
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| 55 | Your server account might be set up with a non-english language as the |
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| 56 | default. If so, and you don't set LANG in the restart script, that |
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| 57 | default language will be used. |
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