Multi language support

[rob040]

There have been previous requests about supporting some other language other than English.
See e.g. issue #20

The OpenWeatherMap does indeed support a 'lang=xx' option, but that does only a partial job; it will give the weather description and the city name is local language.

Many European languages do have specific characters outside the standard ASCII-96 table, the so-called extended character set.
With the available fixed-size 5x7 pixel font in the Adafruit GFX library, which contains the CP437 extended character set from the original IBM PC, many of those characters can be displayed, but not all!

Note that all outside communication, like from OWM, Web page Marquee message box or MQTT message can / will contain multi-byte UTF-8 characters when language-specific characters are included.

So, it is a must have to perform some translation of UTF-8 character strings to the CP437 character set, as a basis to support multiple languages.

I have already started work on translating the near full set of the CP437 character set and have added the € sign as well. This is not yet available in github yet; (WIP).

Mats has created another approach of translating extended character strings into standard ASCII in his fork / branch at: https://github.com/mats-nk/LEDmatrixClock/tree/matsk

What to translate (and what not)

• weather description
• city name
• Marquee message (from configuration page)
• MQTT message
• Message text like "Temperature","High/Low","Humidity","Pressure", etc
• Error messages
• All (English) text that appear on the LED matrix display
• Excluded is text on any web page, unless content is shared with LED matrix display

What languages to support?

• Limited by OWM Multilingual support, but those are way too many!
• Limited by Latin Unicode set. i.e. no (far-) eastern languages; characters must be presented on 5x8 pixels and in CP437 font set
• German, French, Dutch, ... You tell me ?

You can request a language you like to be supported, but be prepared to submit and review translations .

[mats-nk]

I have experienced that introducing multilingual support seems to be hard, so I am about to start a new project that has this as a part of the project goals from the start.

That project will also support both ESP8266 and ESP32 to be able to handle new hardware that is emerging.

The code will also have focus on remove the settings file to be hardcoded but to be dynamic.

And the user should be able to upload a language file from either a repository or a self made one.

So good luck with your journey and perhaps we meet again.

[rob040]

How is your visa project going?

[rob040]

I am at a point of introducing multilingual support for 12 European languages. AI has been helpful in producing the translations.
Also, the LED display font file has been adapted to include € euro sign, so that the scrolling text can show prices etc.

I have a short TODO list that may be included in next release, but can also be delayed to following releases:

• Add short date format option: DD-MM-YYYY, MM-DD-YYYY, YYYY-MM-DD
• Add long date format option: "Dayname, DD Monthname", "Dayname, Monthname DD", same + YYYY
• Add option for temperature symbol: C, F, K
• Add option for wind speed symbol: m/s, km/h, mph, knots
• Add option for pressure symbol: mb, hPa, inHg, PSI
• Update display font file for improved readability of some characters.

Comments are as always welcome

[rob040]

Work completed. See release 3.4.0.

With this all above points are implemented, except the short date format, which wasn't used at all.

If there are any other wishes regarding language support, discuss them here.
If you find bugs in translations or others, create an new issue.
If you have improvement ideas, create a PR and/or discuss in new discussion tread.

[Xfiles-de]

Thanks .
Works very well. But zero "0" looks strange when it's only 4 pixels wide, and other numbers are 5 pixels wide.

[rob040]

I wanted to get rid of the slashed zero, and still be different from the letter 'O'.
In current typography, the O and 0 differentiate in their width.
Not all digits are 5 pixels wide; the '1' is 3 pixels wide.
It may be something you have to get used to.

[Xfiles-de]

Ok . but at the time it looks very strange.