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From: spolsky-joel@cs.yale.edu (Joel Spolsky)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.ms.programmer
Subject: Re: STRING'ing around...
Message-ID: <27407@cs.yale.edu>
Date: 26 Nov 90 21:14:54 GMT
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In article <2116.2750d1c5@iccgcc.decnet.ab.com> gardner@iccgcc.decnet.ab.com writes:
>I was wondering if anyone could explain how to use a STRING resource in a
>dialog box...

The idea of internationalizationability (whew!) is that you have all
the text the user sees in one place, ideally one file, so by
translating that one file you can localize. In the Windows model, that
file is the .RC (resource) file which contains dialog boxes, strings,
Accelerators, etc.

If your dialog box template is defined in your .rc file, you will not
need to use STRING resources. Let the translators just translate the
whole dialog box. In some cases, this will require modifying the
layout of the dialog box -- for example when you go to Tok Pisin you
will discover that "File Name" takes aobut 50 characters... or when
you go to Arabic, the layout will probably be right - to - left. Also
the accelerators will change: if Alt-S used to mean File Save, and you
are converting to Esperanto where this function is now called Filo
Ekribe you may want to change the accelerator to Alt-E.

Joel Spolsky
spolsky@cs.yale.edu                                     Silence = Death