NEWS.md

In potools: Tools for Internationalization and Portability in R Packages

potools 0.2.3 (in development)

New features

• To encourage a more modular workflow, translate_package() has been split into individual exported functions. Thanks @hadley for the suggestion & design review, in addition to the effort filing PRs to achieve this.
  • po_extract() extracts messages from package source code to create template .pot files (@hadley, #243).
  • po_create() creates skeletal .po files for a given language from the .pot template (@hadley, #235)
  • po_compile() converts .po translation files into binary .mo files used for installation (@hadley, #234).
  • po_update() incorporates and merges source message changes to existing .po files (@hadley, #235)
• Two new vignettes, "Translation for package developers" and "Translation for package translators" explain in some detail the process of translation from two perspectives -- that of the package developer and that of the message translator.
• check_potools_sys_reqs() (mostly intended for internal use, but exported for testing) gains a which argument to fine-tune which system requirements to check, #275 and #288. Thanks @hadley for the suggestion and @LDalby for early dev testing which emphasized the need for this.
• New po_explain_plurals() helps de-mystify how to supply plurals for different languages. For example, po_explain_plurals("pl", 3) explains that "For Polish (Polski), plural index 2 applies when n = 0, 5-21, 25-31, 35-41, ...", #278. Thanks @hadley for the suggestion to independently export this functionality which was already used as part of translate_package().

Bug fixes

• translate_package() works in batch mode, #224. Thanks @HenrikBengtsson for the report.
• check_cracked_messages() recognizes named arguments (e.g. call. to stop() or appendLF to message()) and keeps them in the original call, #227. Thanks @hadley for the report.
• A test for non-GNU versions of gettext has been improved, #221. Please report any issues here -- I don't have any good way of testing non-GNU tools.
• .po files generated by {potools} will default to using charset=UTF-8, not charset=ASCII, to prevent encoding issues (@michaelchirico, #299). Thanks @maelle for the report!

Notes

• {potools} now has a site built by pkgdown and hosted on GitHub pages: https://michaelchirico.github.io/potools/. Thanks @hadley for the initial implementation.
• {potools} has a new hex logo featuring a potoo! Thanks to @hadley for coordinating and @allisonhorst for the drawing!
• The test suite now relies on the 3rd edition of testthat, meaning a version requirement in the Suggested dependency.
• The default value of verbose has been changed to TRUE in translate_package() and get_message_data(). Verbosity has also been increased to help detect the source of issues, #288. Thanks for @LDalby for reporting an unhelpful error.
• The package now contains Japanese translations of potools itself to serve as an example. See po/R-ja.po. #241; thanks @HenrikBengtsson for the suggestion.

New languages/locales supported out of the box:

• Swedish (svenska)

potools 0.2.2 (July 2021)

• Skip tests on machines where gettext is unavailable, #187; also alter the msgfmt command executed to create .mo files to skip options unavailable on Solaris, #218
• Faster parsing of src messages (e.g. get_message_data() for the base package reduced from 14 to 7 seconds), #119
• [New feature] New argument max_translations for translate_package() to limit the number of translations done, #188
• When adding metadata for a new language, added tolerance for whitespace differences in specifying plurals, #183
• [New feature] get_message_data() skips over messages on lines with comments # notranslate, and regions of lines between matched pairs of comments # notranslate start and # notranslate end, #10. Most useful for small fragmentary strings that are untranslateable/not worth translating, and for strings that are technically untranslateable (e.g., because they contain \r).
• [New function] write_po_file() to convert a message database to a .po or .pot file manually (previously this was handled internally by translate_package()), #203. Also a constructor for the associated po_metadata class, po_metadata(). See ?po_metadata.
• [Bugfix] get_message_data() does a better job on files with unmatched parentheses inside preprocessor macros (#defines) in C/C++ files, #199

potools 0.2.0 (June 2021)

• Landed on CRAN!

potools documentation built on Nov. 2, 2023, 5:20 p.m.