EDIT files .eng .spa

[Pastrana]

I would like to be able to edit the language files .eng .spa etc.. When I open it with an editor strange characters appear (example /b among others).  How can I open and see the text to be translated correctly.  Thanks

[Sketch]

Open them with any text editor, such as Notepad, Notepad++, Visual Studio Code, etc, etc.

[Pastrana]

10 minutes ago, Sketch said:

Open them with any text editor, such as Notepad, Notepad++, Visual Studio Code, etc, etc.

Yes, but other characters appear, I suppose they indicate to the game engine the bold, line break, etc.  When translating it is cumbersome.  Opening it without those characters would allow a faster and more automatic translation.

[Sketch]

Can you post your Eng file? Maybe I can take a look at it.

[Pastrana]

 

12 minutes ago, Sketch said:

Can you post your Eng file? Maybe I can take a look at it.

Thanks when I get home I'll pass the file.

[Billsponge1972]

With notepad the only things I find are ; < and > 

I've done quite a bit of translating and it's pretty easy but tedious. 

Also, direct translations are odd sometimes. For example, Russian translation of "airplane" turns into "car" so you have to do some deciphering!

[AEthelraedUnraed]

56 minutes ago, Pastrana said:

Yes, but other characters appear, I suppose they indicate to the game engine the bold, line break, etc.  When translating it is cumbersome.  Opening it without those characters would allow a faster and more automatic translation.

Yes, certain (HTML-based) character sequences are used to indicate line breaks or markup. These are:

• <br> Line break.
• <b>text</b> "text" will be written bold.
• <i>text</i> "text" will be written in italics.
• <u>text</u> "text" will be underlined.

You should not remove or change these characters, or you'll mess up the formatting of the mission briefing (i.e. there will not be any line breaks anymore and any bold/italic/underlined text will be plain text). I suppose you *could* use some kind of WYSIWYG html editor, but personally I'd be extremely wary of them since these tend to do all kinds of "optimisations" on their own (e.g. change ü into &uuml;), add stuff that shouldn't be there (e.g. <p> tags around your text) or use different html tags than IL2 uses (e.g. <strong> instead of <b> or <br /> instead of <br>). All of these are likely to screw up the mission briefing.

 

I think the better - and certainly the safest - option would be to just take it for what it is and leave all the tags in place. If you want a preview of how it's going to look, you could use a real-time html compiler though (e.g. https://htmledit.squarefree.com/ works perfectly for this purpose). Just copy-paste the text you want to translate in there. You'd still have the tags, but at least you'll see the markup as it'll show up in-game - and you'll immediately notice if you accidentally screw something up.

Edited April 8, 2022 by AEthelraedUnraed

[Pastrana]

Thanks, good info.  I'll start with those tests.