BR Mar  9 2000

This directory contains files related to the language data used by
Atoms and TkAtoms.  Atoms is able to "speak" many different languages
because all textual data (i.e. widget labels, warning messages, and so 
on) is read from external files at startup time.  To make this process 
efficient at run and easy to use when actually writing code, the
language data is read by Atoms in the form of interpretable perl
code.

Because the perl code is not so easy to maintain when updating or
translating the language data itself, the data is contained in simple
database files which can maintained using a spreadsheet or some
similar database utility.  The language data could be kept in a single
file, but that seems a little unwieldy, given the quantity of data
involved (over 360 entries at the time I am writing this).  Instead I
have divided the data into several files and grouped the data
conceptually.  For example, all help balloon entries are in one file,
and all the strings used by the space group browser are in another,
and so on.

The data is contained in simple database files.  All text is ascii.
Records are separated by a line break.  Fields in records are
separated by a semicolon (;).  Literal newlines in text strings are
represented by \n.

This means that virtually any database program should be able to read
and write these database files.  I personally use a little thing
called Gaby (http://gaby.netpedia.net/).  It is not exactly good, but
it works.  Use whatever program you like, but please observe the rules
in the next paragraph.

There are a few restrictions on the text data.  The semicolon may
not be used in text data as it will be confused with the record
separator.  Single quotes, dollar signs, at signs, and percent signs
should be escaped using a backslash character.  Double quotes should
never be used.  Beyond that, just about anything else is ok.  In
particular, accented characters using the ISO-8859-1 encoding can be
used -- this lets you use things like è, á, ñ, ç, «, », and ß.

Once perl 5.6 is released, we can start using unicode.  This means
that soon Atoms will be able to speak languages like Chinese,
Japanese, Korean, Ethiopic, and so on.

Each record in each file is organized like so:

   keyword ; English ; Spanish ; French ; German (etc)

At the time of this writing, those are the only languages supported.
(German isn't actually supported.  There are entries in the German
fields, but the entries are in English.) As I find more volunteers to
do translations, I will append more fields to the end of each record
and clearly explain the order.



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			       MANIFEST

table.labels		titles and labels in TkAtoms 
table.help		help balloons
table.dialogs		dialogs for Atoms and TkAtoms
table.file_dialog	strings for file dialog widget
table.sgb		strings for space group browser
table.messages		warnings/errors for atoms and tkatoms
table.config		strings for TkAtoms configuration frame

README			this file
