MultiLang - a library to add several languages to applications

Features:

• The languages are selected by identifiers in the application
• The texts are referred to as integer identifiers in the source code - this connects the texts (captions) and the UI elements (like buttons, static texts, checkboxes, etc)
• The texts are edited in plain text files, with each line consisting each translation of the given text (separated by pipes, CSV-like structure)
• The translation files can be loaded directly from a textfile at runtime, or (on Windows) they can be added to (and accessed by) the application as a simple resource (becoming part of the exe as RCDATA)
• The whole UI language can be changed simply (with function call) - only with VCL (C++ Builder)
• Easy addition the available languages to the system menu of the application's main window

The structure of the translation file is:

0|1|2 1003|Insert|Beszúr|Einfügen 1004|Overwrite|Felülír|Überschreiben 1005|Modified|Módosítva|Modifiziert 1006|Caps

Explanation:

• The first line consists of the languages used in the file (internal ids)
• A translation line contains the text id and the translations of the given text, in order of the language identifiers
• If there is only one translation in a line, this one will be used for each language

The following C++ code shows the usage of the example translation file:

TLangTable lang_table("translations.txt"); lang_table.SetLang(0); // or 1 for hungarian, or 2 for german cout << lang_table.GetText(1003).c_str() << endl; cout << lang_table.GetText(20000, "default text").c_str() << endl; // here the default will be used, as the example doesn't define a text with 20000 // VCL/C++ Builder specific lang_table.SetLang(MainForm); // this sets the captions of all controls in the given form/dialog // the Tag field of the components will be used, for example if a button's Tag field is // 1004, its caption will be set to "Overwrite" // Windows specific lang_table.InitFromResource(HInstance, "translations"); // in this case, we have to add to the project an .rc file // consisting of the following line: // translations RCDATA translations.txt // a simple call to add our languages to the system menu LangAppendSystemMenuDefs(GetSystemMenu(Handle, FALSE)); // the result is this // the application will have to handle the WM_SYSCOMMAND messages, with IDM_LANG_EN, IDM_LANG_HU and IDM_LANG_DE parameters

Applications that use the library:

• MEditor
• ECalc