Pavel's diary

[email protected]: localizing extras/source/palettes

Extras module of OpenOffice.org contains several different directories that are relevant for localizers. In this entry, I'm going to describe how files in the directory palettes works, where they are used etc. in upcoming OpenOffice.org 2.0.

The directory extras/source/palettes contains files with different extensions:

• sob - Bitmaps
• soc - Colors (palettes)
• sod - Line styles
• soe - Arrow styles
• sog - Gradients
• soh - Hatching

Where to find them all in GUI? As you probably know, I'm very bad user of OpenOffice.org so I had to ask Tom Verbeek, extras maintainer, for help. He provided very good description.

Start OpenOffice.org Draw and create new drawing. Now draw a line (e.g. with arrow on one side) and a rectangle like on the following image. The line is solid, with simple arrow. The rectangle is filed with "Blue 7" color (the default).

Now imagine you want to change properties/look of the rectangle. Press right button on it, and click on Area first and select Colors tab. You'll see the following dialog (click on the image to see large version).



You can see the "Load Color List" icon there. By using this icon, you can load Colors defined in files with extension soc.

There are Gradients, Hatching and Bitmaps tabs on this dialog where you can load gradient styles (with the extension .sog), hatching styles (with the extension .soh) or bitmaps (with the extension .sob).

Press Escape several times to get back to the drawing and press right button on the line and select Line. You'll see another dialog with several tabs:



In the tab Line Styles you can select the style of the line and also open Line styles stored in a file with extension sod. In the tab Arrow Styles you can select the style of arrows and also open Arrow styles stored in a file with extension soe.

Now you know how to use these files, but what about their internal structure and location in OpenOffice.org source code and installed product?

The source code directory extras/source/palettes has the following structure: it contains files standard.so? where ? stands for letters b, c, d, e, g or h and also other files (like web.soc or html.soc) and directory lang. Common files are not to be translated. So only lang directory is interesting for localizers. It contains directories named according to ISO codes (see the table of supported languages) with additional files. If you plan to create localized version, you have to translate (or at least copy) the directory en-US. E.g. I had to copy and translate files in en-US directory to the directory cs (see child workspace pj05 and issue #i34312#).

When you install e.g. English version of the latest milestone (SRC680_m54 right now), all of these files are in your .../user/config directory.

And now some words about the structure of every file type.

• sob file contains bitmaps. The file is ZIPed with classic ZIP/JAR and contains office:bitmap-table XML element and several images.
• soc file contains colors in office:color-table XML element with their definitions inside draw:color elements. It is in UTF-8 and you have to translate the names of colors in draw:name.
• sod file contains line styles in office:dash-table XML element with their definitions inside draw:stroke-dash elements. It is in UTF-8 and you have to translate the names of line styles.
• soe file contains arrow styles in office:marker-table XML element with their definitions inside draw:marker elements. It is in UTF-8 and you have to translate the names of arrow styles.
• sog file contains gradient styles in office:gradient-table XML element with their definitions inside draw:gradient elements. It is in UTF-8 and you have to translate the names of gradient styles.
• soh file contains hatching styles in office:hatch-table XML element with their definitions inside draw:hatch elements. It is in UTF-8 and you have to translate the names of hatching styles.

You can also rename files copied from en-US directory to help users understand the contents of files (e.g. hatching.soh is very strange for Czech people, but srafovani.soh is quite ok).

And this is all. Hopefully this will help you to localize even small details like this one. -----