Translatable prompts
Quanvert Text provides facilities for displaying prompts, table options and help texts in languages other than English. Up to three different languages are allowed per computer. The default is English: other languages which are automatically searched for are French, German, Italian and Spanish.
Help texts may be translated as they stand, but the prompts and other texts need to be translated and then converted into the fast computer-readable form expected by Quanvert Text.
Note The program that converts the translated text is textconv; this program is distributed as part of Quanvert Text.
Each text in the prompt files consists of a 4-digit zero-filled number (for example, 0001), a space and the text starting in column 6. You must retain this format in your translations. Additionally there are some special characters used internally by Quanvert Text which should be retained in their original form during translation; these are generally single characters preceded by % or \ signs.
English texts are stored in the english subdirectory of the main Quanvert program directory, $QVHOME. Files containing help texts have names starting with the letters qvh_, while the files of program prompts are called qotext.dat and qvtext.dat.
To run Quanvert in a language other than English
1 Go to $QVHOME and create a subdirectory with the name of the new language.
2 Copy all the English text files into this new directory.
3 Translate the texts in the .dat files (and the qvh_ files if you want).
4 Convert the .dat files into computer-readable form by typing:
textconv file_prefix
file_prefix is qv to convert qvtext.dat or qo to convert qotext.dat.
This creates a file prefixconv.dat (for example, qvtext.dat creates qvconv.dat) which is used for each Quanvert Text session by users whose entry in the users file requests this language. If Quanvert Text is only ever to be run in one language, you need only that language directory and can delete those you will never use.
To display prompts in any language other than those mentioned above, create the language file as described above and then add a line to the file availang in the Quanvert program directory as follows:
language [directory]
where language is the name of the language you have just created as you want to use it in the users file, and directory is the name of the directory containing the language files. If this is the same as the language, it may be omitted. For example, on a UNIX system you might write:
english
if you have lang=english in the users file and want to read English texts from the directory $QVHOME/english. Alternatively, if you have lang=french in the users file and you want to read French texts from the directory $QVHOME/notenglish, write:
french notenglish
See also