Cool VL Viewer forum

hello.. i'm missing the language german in the cool vl. i can klick but it dont work.
perhaps i do something wrong. but what??

and the great translator is not in the viewer anymore ((

There are simply no translations available for the many menus... The old Snowglobe translated menus are too outdated to be of any practical use in the Cool VL Viewer, and I can't translate the English menus in German (neither Italian, Spanish, etc, etc...) myself... So, if you want German menus, you'd have to create the translations or find someone to do it; you may take example on the Snowglobe v1.4.2 skins/default/xui/de/*.xml files (you may even try to reuse them "as is", as long as you don't reuse notifications.xml: that one is so outdated that it could cause issues...).

Google's free translation service was shut down back in December 2011, and since I don't want to encourage people to use a paying service (be it Google's or some other), the translation feature was simply removed from the viewer.

Which files should be translated, Henri? Is there a system like the .po files in Linux? I don't speak German, but I am interested in starting a translation in Greek.

You would have to add a skins/default/xui/gr/ folder with the *.xml translation files for Greek. I don't think there are any Greek translations for any viewer for now, but you can still have a look at another language folder in Snowglobe (Snowglobe-1.4.2/skins/default/xui/de/ for example).

Each of those XML files correspond to a file in the skins/default/xui/en-us/ folder (which is the only folder to hold the full floaters/panels/menus definitions): for each element in the English (en-us) version of the floater/panel/menus definition, you must add a similar definition in your translation XML file, but only specifying the UI element name (name="" parameter, which must be the same as in the English menu), and the translated label and/or text for that element. The viewer will then override the label/text for each UI element in the en-us XML file with the one defined in the corresponding language translation XML file, based on the UI element name.

Example, in a menu definition, you could have the following button:

and then in the German translation file, you would have:


Be aware that when translating, it is best keeping the translated text length equal to or shorter than the English text, since the room for that text in the floater is adjusted for the English text and using a larger text might result in truncated or overlapping text elements... You can test the translated floaters with the Advanced -> XUI -> Load from XML feature (which alas can't help in the case of panels and menus).

Aha. I understand, and thank you for the very detailed response. I'll give it a shot and if I manage it —when, because it will be a big undertaking— I'll contact again

I'm not positive, but I also think that Singularity has a Dutch(DE) translation built in to it, that you might want to use for comparision purposes ?

Singularity's menus are different from the Cool VL Viewer's: they won't be more helpful than Snowglobe's...