[R-gui] tcltk internationalization for built-in buttons

[Ulrike Groemping]

Dear R-SIG-GUIs,

documentation of getLanguage / setLanguage in tcltk2 pointed me towards the
msgcat package in Tcl/Tk, and I used it for internationalizing my GUI
entries - trying to avoid having to write individual tools like
RcmdrTkmessagebox etc. I am an absolute Tcl/Tk beginner and still looking
for the final strategy to do a larger GUI project in, currently working on
Windows with R 2.8.0 or R 2.7.1 (behave identical). And one important aspect
is internationalization.

I have now managed to program my draft and not yet functional GUI in English
and show it in German by using an msg file with msgcat. On my computer,
everything shows well in German. Then I got the idea that it would be nice
to show an msgcat example in the help for getLanguage/setLanguage, and I
prepared a toy example for sending to Philippe (cf. below). However, while
changing the language does change most messages, it does not work with
built-in buttons - these remain German on my machine, even if I restart my
computer after changing system settings for all language aspects I could
find on my computer from German to English.

I remember having read something like that from John, when he started
internationalizing Rcmdr, but I had thought it would be long solved by now.
Since internationalization appears to work at installation time (otherwise
my buttons wouldn't be in German), and since there are many tcltk message
files in the Tcl directory, it looks to me - as a possibly rather naive
tcltk novice - that one would just have to find a way to reset some
environment variable or otherwise direct tcltk to look in the right places. 

Any thoughts on that ?

Regards, Ulrike

####### the toy example follows
require(tcltk)
### the following two lines must be executed BEFORE loading tcltk2
### otherwise they do not work !!!
tcl("::msgcat::mcload","C:/testdirectory")
ilab <- function(lab)
tclvalue(tcl("namespace","eval","::tcl::minidummy","::msgcat::mc",.Tcl.args(lab)))

## mini example of German tcl message file
## has to be saved under name de.msg 
## in the testdirectory given above
## without the comment character in lines below
## (it is important to avoid line breaks within individual mset entries)
#namespace eval ::tcl::minidummy {
#   ::msgcat::mcset de "If you choose Yes, all unsaved inputs will be lost."
"Wenn Sie Ja wählen, gehen alle noch nicht gespeicherten Eingaben verloren."
#    ::msgcat::mcset de "Really Exit WITHOUT Save ?" "Wirklich OHNE
Speichern Beenden ?"
#    ::msgcat::mcset de "Yes pressed" "Ja gedrückt"
#    ::msgcat::mcset de "No pressed" "Nein gedrückt"
#}

imsgboxtest <- function(){
td <- tclvalue(tkmessageBox(message=ilab("If you choose Yes, all unsaved
inputs will be lost."),
             title=ilab("Really Exit WITHOUT Save
?"),type="yesno",default="yes",icon="question"))
       if (td == "yes") cat(paste(ilab("Yes pressed"),"\n")) else
cat(paste(ilab("No pressed"),"\n"))
}
imsgboxtest()

require(tcltk2)  ## ruins functionality of the load and function definition
above
                     ## if loaded too early!
oldlang <- getLanguage()
if (oldlang != "") {
        # Switch to English and test a command that issues a warning
        if (setLanguage("en_US")) imsgboxtest()
        # Switch to French and test a command that issues a warning
        if (setLanguage("fr_FR")) imsgboxtest()
        # Switch to German and test a command that issues a warning
        if (setLanguage("de_DE")) imsgboxtest()
        # Restore previous language
        setLanguage(oldlang) 
}

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