New Project VI

I have been beavering away on this one solidly for two months now.

It's shaped up (turned out) like this:-

1) At the Setup Forms box you get to choose between Default (English), Local and Design captions. In Design mode you see captions on the various forms like:- this_is_a_label. This is so you know which one to look for if you want to change (edit) it.

The intention here being that if a user wanted to develop a set of captions (in Spanish, say), it would be the Local set that would be worked upon, and then (when finished) the setting changed to Local. Note that the Default set may be edited as well (so the possibility for totally "customising" - or screwing-up - the appearance of the program is there). Users at lower levels of access are denied all this fun, sadly!

2) All such as these can now be edited to suit your purposes:-

Form labels
Form (and browser) titles
Log messages
Menu bars
Note-taking messages
Push-button captions
Tool texts (hints) ... etc.

... plus, of course, all of the data (which is - or can be - your own stuff, anyway).

3) Changes may be made at a Captions browser. This is where you need to know which one you're looking for! However, a serious user might just like to go ahead and translate (change, edit ... whatever) the whole lot! Once you've done one or two, it's easy enough to get the hang of.

At the moment, the Captions look-up table (datafile) sits at 1,975 records (with more yet to come ... an accurate count of captions can be seen at the bottom of the printout generated at Forms->1st formatted reports->Default captions), so if anyone feels a need to wade through that lot with a view to translating it all ... well, it shouldn't take too long.

It's probably not as daunting as it sounds, as many of the captions are only one or two short words (and the maximum caption string is 32 characters long). About four days solid work for anyone with language skills, I reckon!

As mentioned before, translating the Help file (350-plus records with text narratives) would be a major tour de force. I may simply "leave as is" (as users at a suitable level of access can edit it anyway) or perhaps add another memo field for users to play with as they see fit.

But at the moment I see no (easy) way to be able to translate (or edit) the formats of the 150-plus preformatted "legacy" reports that the system still retains (in fact, "hand-coding" may be the only route open to me there). So users may simply have to live with those. There are also 70 (at last count) "hand-coded" reports that could be candidates for alternative caption options, but (as anyone reading this can no doubt tell), it all takes time.

If anyone wants to have a look at the system in its current state, feel free to get in touch, and I would be happy to zip up a "beta" distro. I mention this as I notice downloads being ... er, downloaded from this site, but point out that (although it still looks more or less the same at first glance) the program mechanisms have changed quite substantially as a result of all this tweaking and general surgery!

Having said all that ... now it's time for a cup of tea, then back to work!