Consider making the output less verbose for lcftrans?

1

Hello, O great people!

I don’t know if this question should be put on GitHub or here but…
Have you considered making the output of lcftrans less verbose? Currently it extracts all the texts into Portable Object (I guess…) format (.po)

But it can make the translation a bit messy, especially when the game use a lot of message commands like \C[x] and so on.

I am currently using RPGRewriter, a translation tool for RPG Maker 2k(3) made by vgperson, as an alternative to DreaMaker, another tool that was doing the same task but which isn’t working with the newest version of RPG Maker 2003 (Steam version). It extracts all text datas and then make possible to re-compile all the LMU files from the edited texts.

On the other hand, lcftrans is extremely promising for the multi-language feature! This is just awesome. But I still want to point out the difference with DreaMaker and RPGRewriter regarding the output:

lcftrans:

---
#. ID 1, Page 1, Line 4, Pos (0,14)
msgid ""
"\\>ATTENTION, USAGE D'RTP ! (graphismes de base)\n"
"\n"
"\\>\\C[5]\"Rien n'est mieux que le pire pour tester ses\n"
" \\>capacités de mapping\"\\<\\|\\|\\|\\|\\|\\^"
msgstr ""

RPGRewriter:

**********Event1**********
-----Page1-----
#Message#
\>ATTENTION, USAGE D'RTP ! (graphismes de base)

\>\C[5]"Rien n'est mieux que le pire pour tester ses
 \>capacités de mapping"\<\|\|\|\|\|\^
##

I don’t mean to make them identical, but it’s easier to translate the game with the less verbose output because we need to check the length of each line for the 38/50 character limit and basically it’s already tiring to translate all those texts even without the escaping char \, the string double quotes " and the newline characters \n. :grin:

A workaround would be to use RPGRewriter to translate a game and then extract the texts again with lcftrans, for lazy people like me.

The other point is that I’ve created a Visual Studio Code extension for RPGRewriter and I was willing to create another extension for lcftrans, this extension adds syntax highlighting for message commands (\C[x] and so on) + preview panel for line length checking without the message commands.

Before I start making such extension I would like to know your opinion on this point!

Best regards <3
Joke

2

Po files is what most open source projects use for translation.

Thats the reason why we used them: The tooling around them is pretty good.

We cannot change the format without breaking stuff.

They are not supposed to be edited by humans directly. You must use a dedicated tool, e.g. Poedit. Then it will look much nicer :slight_smile:

3

Oh, I did not understand how those .po files have to be edited. So we must keep the original in msgid and give the translation below msgstr, and indeed it’s better to do that with Poedit.

Ok then, I understand :slightly_smiling_face: Sounds good!

Poedit generates .mo files too, do we need to keep them?

4

No, Player does not use .mo (compiled .po) files; it parses .po directly. So, you can remove the .mo safely.