Translating Night Vision

Night Vision is now "open source" software, meaning the source code can now be downloaded and modified directly. The following instructions, written before open sourcing, serve as a guide as to which source files to focus on (and provide a method of translating without the source code).


Night Vision has been designed to be readily translatable into other languages without the author's assistance. (At least those that use a single byte character set. It is unknown what issues, if any, may arise with languages that use a double byte character set.)

The following files or groups of files are translatable:

To translate these files requires some knowledge of html (which is the markup language used for web documents), familiarity with a command-line window (issuing commands, making directories, ...), and the Java Archive Tool (jar) which is contained in the Java2 Software Development Kit (SDK). Some limited programming experience is highly recommended, otherwise the following instructions will probably not make much sense.

The basic procedure is as follows:

  1. Locate the Night Vision jar file, nvj.jar, in your installation. If it cannot be found (e.g. it is buried in a .exe file on a Windows install), then download the .zip file (for manual installs) from the Night Vision web site and extract it.
  2. Create a clean directory and place a copy of the jar file, nvj.jar, and the documentation file, nvj.html, in it.
  3. Extract the files to be translated via the following commands:
      jar xvf nvj.jar com/nvastro/nvj/nvlocations.txt
      jar xvf nvj.jar com/nvastro/nvj/nvstarnames.txt
      jar xvf nvj.jar com/nvastro/nvj/nvdeepsky.txt
      jar xvf nvj.jar com/nvastro/nvj/Text.properties
      jar xvf nvj.jar com/nvastro/nvj/help/
    
  4. Translate nvj.html and the files in the com/nvastro/nvj and com/nvastro/nvj/help subdirectories. Special care must be taken when altering Text.properties. This file contains numerous "key=value" pairs, where each "value" is a piece of text used within the Night Vision windows. It is very important that the "key" text is not altered, otherwise Night Vision will likely crash when this text is accessed.
    To aid translation, nvj.html and the help files in the com/nvastro/nvj/help subdirectory are viewable with a standard web browser.
    The names of the help files, and the links within those files should not be changed, otherwise Night Vision will be unable to locate the desired help page. Adding new files and links is OK.
  5. After the files are translated, merge the altered files into nvj.jar by issuing the following command within the directory that the original extraction took place:
      jar uvf nvj.jar com/nvastro/nvj
    
  6. Test the translated Night Vision with the following command:
      java -jar nvj.jar
    
    Changes can be easily made by re-editting the extracted files and then merging the files back into nvj.jar.