IFF catalog add-on for Haiku Locale Kit
I made this as part of my work on porting ACE to Haiku. ACE originates from MorphOS, and so it uses "catalog" files for internationalization in the format used there. The format is based on the IFF container typical on Amiga originated software.
Since the Haiku version of ACE uses pretty much exactly the same strings as the MorphOS version, it would be silly to have to re-translate all the strings. So I made this add-on to Haiku locale kit to handle catalogs in the MorphOS format.
At the moment this is not useful to any other software than ACE. However, maybe someone will find it useful. The format is a bit different than what is done in Haiku. In the Haiku locale kit, the original (usually English) string is used as a key for translations. This requires hashing the whole string, which makes everything a bit slower. It isn't very noticeable on modern machines, but it is definitely part of what makes Haiku slower than BeOS. On the other hand, the format used on MorphOS assigns an integer to each string, which can be used to refer to it efficiently. It still provides fallback strings inside the executable, so if there is no catalog, things will still work.
Maybe we could use this format more on Haiku and get better performance. But it would require a lot of changes to the tooling built around the existing format. Maybe a project for later...
You can get the iffcatalog sourcecode:
If you want to simply use it, the binaries are available in Haiku package manager.
Version history:
- 0.1 - 04/2015 - First public release
- 0.2 - 11/2017 - Skip '\0' in translated strings (used for keyboard shortcuts on MorphOS)
- 0.3 - 06/2020 - Fix catalog search directory
- 0.4 - 02/2022 - Add a python script to generate locale_strings.h from catalog definitions
- 0.5 - 10/2023 - Remove dependency on libtextencoding, which is not safely usable in a Haiku add-on unless the host app links with it as well. Fix a bug in the locale_strings.h generator with handling of escape sequences.
