From my side I need to practice a little bit how to create the .inf files so I can review the .ipf translation on the help file.
The IPF compiler ipfc.exe plus its files have to be installed. Therefore install any toolkit (best is the last). The IPF language is described in book\ipfref.inf.
I don't like editing IPF directly, as Alex does it. I always use a preprocessor that eases the work for me extremely. Others might have other opinions. As the co-author of HyperText/2 and the author of the compiler back from IPF to HTEXT, I always use that tool for .INF or .HLP file creation.
There are things that I dislike about the translation, but that is because of the age of the platform and that some components has different ways to get translated than others.
BTW: I don't like that the installer has repeated text strings, that have to be maintained separately, also for translation. Joachim finally had reduced that enormously in the last eCS, but now the same error was made again.
One thing is the code page. I'm using 850 for Spanish and I know it works fine, but it is old. I know the modern standard is Unicode but I don't know all the effort it can be to support Unicode on the OS/2 platform for translations. Maybe someone with more experience can explain me that or give their personal opinion.
Most OS/2 apps, especially system apps, can't handle Unicode. Newer OS/2 versions have functions for that, but OS/2 will never work with Unicode without a major rewrite of its tools (without having the sources).
The other thing is that each component has a different way to be translated, which is logical because some components were made by different developers and maybe with different standards. I would like to hear opinions and maybe see some samples of which is a program that made a good standard for translations. Which do you think is a good reference app that supports translations ?
That may be interesting for discussion, but most sources are not available. We can be lucky, that .MSG files can be exchanged and resources of the binaries can be replaced later to manipulate a lot (and that the toolkit provides tools for that, together with the external resource decompiler and the external lxlite tool).
There exist numerous tools to ease the translation. Some let one change the language on-the-fly, some use text files, some load parts of it in memory, some use EAs. All these are quite young and as above, can't affect the system tools. The diversity will remain.
My favorite is .TMF (Text Message File), invented by Christian, rewritten by Ulrich. The source remains plain text and to speed searching up, an index is built. Ulrich's variant is good for the system extensions, like XWP, because it's being loaded into memory. For other apps, that memory should better be saved, until it will be used. But I don't like the markup syntax in .TMF files. It's sometimes hard for the human eye to find a string.
For me, the index is a must, to get reasonable performance. The Pascal apps like NewView use also text files, but without an index, at least not a permanent one. There exists also a tool from Russia that uses zipped text files, probably using a similar method.