There are tools to create catalogs on Aminet, but no one is quite useful for programmer and users, because of the lack of features.
SimpleCat solves all these problems! It's using the commodore based format with some little extensions to allow to one single file to keep all language specific information. SimpleCat is able to create all locale files at once. It's also possible to export the normal commodore compatible files for backward compatibly. To upgrade you current development files just let SimpleCat to auto create a new CS File (Catalog Script).
There is no GUI needed. Just use your preferred text editor to edit SimpleCat's catalog scripts like you did before with the #?.cd files, but this time only one file needs to be edited. You should take a look into the included examples!
For those ever rejected SimpleCat due the lack of a GUI, will now reject the other tools due the fact SimpleCat V3 is coming with a full featured MUI GUI. For those how always use shell: Don't panic! Everything stays like before, the GUI is 100% optional and you don't even see any sign of it, if you don't want to. The GUI is also splitted into two different modes: The developer mode and the translator mode. While the developer mode allows the total setup of simplecat catalog scripts the translator mode only provides the needed GUI to make a translation.
Now a few screen shots showing the SimpleCat GUI in action.
Here you can see the SimpleCat main window in developer mode. On the left is a list containing the labels and on the right the corresponding translations for the different languages. It's possible to list and edit other lines like comments and code lines, but this isn't normally required and can be customized to the users preferences.
The same window just in translation mode. As you can see many elements are simply gone, because they are not needed for normal translator actions.
The global set-up is done here.
This window allows to search the entire catalog base currently loaded. By using this feature its possible to search, find and edit specific text sections.
The additional functions provided by catalog scripts can be specified here. Again, in translator mode several elements are hidden.
This is kind of a killer feature. A source code snoop utility.
Yes, you select your source file, remove unwanted strings. Push apply and SimpleCat adds the new strings to the current database. One push on the second button and SimpleCat will modify your source code. All you need to do is add the proper #include lines for including the catalog data files.