Orion/Internationalization

This page is a hub for resources relating to preparing Orion for use in other languages and locales (also known by the abbreviation i18n). This work involves translating strings into other languages (often called NLS for Natural Language Support), handling bi-directional text (BIDI), and preparing content such as dates and times in a format appropriate for a given locale.

Orion Editor

We have been externalizing the editor/textview strings. This is probably the biggest task for most components in Orion (other than the editor). Of course, when strings are externalized, layout problems start showing up.

The editor also needs to make sure stuff like BIDI, IME, DBSC and Unicode Surrogates are all working properly. We paid some attention to these when we were first designing the editor, but there is lots of work to make the Orion editor BIDI aware to the same level of the Eclipse Desktop editor.

For the externalization of strings in the editor we used the i18n plugin of RequireJS. It works quite well and it is lightweight. The one function that is missing is a way to replace template strings like: "Line {0} : Col {1}", but this is a available in dojo (dojo.replace). The editor does not have a dependency on dojo, so we had to write our own.