localization tech note

Title: Localizing the "About Communicator" Page
Platform: Windows

Authors: Rob Thorne, Rick Elliott
Last modified: 21 May 1998

History

5 May 1998: moved information from the Navigator 4.04 notes, with very minor edits.
20 May 1998: edited for public release.

The "About Communicator" page is originally a cross platform HTML resource. For the Windows client, however, it is converted into stringtable resources and stored in resdll.dll. Editing these strings is difficult and error-prone. This technote provides information and tools for handling this more gracefully.

We now recommend doing the About Page as follows:

Use GetAbtBox.exe to extract the HTML for the About Box from your localized Communicator 4.x, and and compare it with the current file in English.
Edit the HTML file you extracted from Communicator 4.x to make sure that the HTML file has the same structure as the current US file.
Generate a .rc file using AbPack.exe.
Open resdll.dll in your Windows resource editor. Delete the about page STRINGTABLE resources (begining at 60200 and continuing to about 60240).
Open the .rc file produced by abpack. Copy the STRINGTABLE resources ONLY (NOT the header or footer information; i.e. only those strings that are preceded by numeric resource IDs). Paste the STRINGTABLE items into resdll.dll.
Save your changes to resdll.dll.
Test your work.

Use GetAbtBox.exe to extract the new .html file from your localized resdll.dll and view that page in Communicator. Fix any errors you find. (You must repeat steps 2 through 6.)
Launch Communicator and choose Help | About Communicator (or type about: in the location field), and check for the security string that displays near the RSA icon. If you've done your work correctly, a localized version of this string will appear in your now localized About Box.

GetAbtBox.exe

This is a Win32 command line program that will extract the About Page STRINGTABLE resources and convert them into an HTML file. The syntax is simple:

GetAbtBox.exe [RESDLL file]

Redirect the output to a file to generate your HTML file:

GetAbtBox.exe RESDLL.DLL > about.html

AbPack.exe

This is a Win32 command line program that will convert an HTML file into a Windows resource script file (.rc). It supports many languages and code pages, including non-Latin single byte as well as multi byte languages.

Here is the help page for the tool, abpack.exe:

`Netscape Communications Corp. L10n ABPACK Utility`

abpack [/c code_page_number] [/l locale_name] file_to_pack.html

The abpack command takes an HTML file and sends to standard output
a Win32 resource file that contains a string table formatted for use
as a Communicator or Navigator 4.0.x about box. Currently, the HTML
file should contain exactly 3 '%s' arguments, which the client will
fill-in at run-time

By default, the program will process the HTML file as Latin 1 text.
You may specify code pages with the /c argument, or a locale with the
/l argument. If you specify both, only /l will be used. You need not
have the specified code page installed on your machine, since the program
has the necessary information already

Legal locals are:

en,fr,de,da,ja,nl,it,pt,es,sv,ko,zh-tw,zh-cn,no,fi,cs,hu,he,ar,ru,pl,ga

Supported code pages are:

932,936,949,950,1250,1251,1252,1255,1256

To use the tool to generate the resources for Korean, either of the following calls would work:

abpack /c 949 Korean.html > Korean.rc

abpack /l ko Korean.html > Korean.rc

Or for any European language that uses Latin1 (code page 1252)

abpack MyHTML.html > MyStringsRC.rc