You cannot select more than 25 topics
Topics must start with a letter or number, can include dashes ('-') and can be up to 35 characters long.
138 lines
4.3 KiB
Markdown
138 lines
4.3 KiB
Markdown
## Language engine and tools
|
|
|
|
### Supported hardware
|
|
|
|
Marlin supports HD44780 character LCD and 128x64 graphical LCD via U8GLIB.
|
|
Because of the limitation of HD44780 hardware, Marlin can only support three
|
|
character sets for that hardware:
|
|
Japanese (kana_utf8), Russian/Cyrillic (ru), or Western (Roman characters)
|
|
|
|
For the graphical LCD modules, there's far less limitation. Users and language
|
|
maintainers can easily change the language translation strings if they save
|
|
with UTF-8 encoding. The only extra step is to regenerate the font data from
|
|
an existing BDF font file.
|
|
|
|
|
|
### How to support a new language?
|
|
|
|
1. prepare the translation source file
|
|
|
|
You need to add a language header file language_xx.h,
|
|
where xx is the language/country code, for example en is for English.
|
|
You may start with a existing language file by copying it to a new location:
|
|
|
|
```bash
|
|
cp language_zh_CN.h language_zh_TW.h
|
|
```
|
|
|
|
Then you can replace the strings in the macro _UxGT().
|
|
|
|
Make sure the file is saved as UTF-8 encoded.
|
|
|
|
|
|
2. Generate the font data file
|
|
|
|
This step is to gather the glyph appearing in the language file from a 9pt bitmap font,
|
|
and save the data in a language_data_xx.h file. So the font used for conversion should
|
|
contain all the characters in your language file.
|
|
|
|
The default bitmap font is WQY's 9pt bitmap font. You may download from
|
|
|
|
http://wenq.org/daily/wqy-bitmapfont-bdf-gb18030-nightly_build.tar.gz
|
|
|
|
or install in Debian/Ubuntu system:
|
|
|
|
```
|
|
sudo apt-get install xfonts-wqy
|
|
```
|
|
|
|
You need also compile the bdf2u8g which convert the BDF font file to U8glib supported data structures.
|
|
Before you compile bdf2u8g, it would better to patch the source file bdf2u8g.c.
|
|
|
|
```
|
|
cd marlin-git/buildroot/share/fonts/
|
|
wget https://github.com/olikraus/u8glib/archive/master.zip
|
|
unzip master.zip
|
|
cd u8glib-master/
|
|
patch -p0 < ../u8glib-bdf2u8g.patch
|
|
make -C tools/font/bdf2u8g/
|
|
cd -
|
|
ln -s u8glib-master/tools/font/bdf2u8g/bdf2u8g
|
|
```
|
|
|
|
The 'genallfont.sh' script will generate the font data for all of the
|
|
language translation files. You may edit the script to change the variable
|
|
LANGS to the list of languages you want to process. For example:
|
|
|
|
```bash
|
|
LANGS="zh_TW"
|
|
```
|
|
|
|
and then run the script to generate the font data (`language_data_xx.h`):
|
|
|
|
```bash
|
|
cd marlin-git/Marlin/
|
|
../buildroot/share/fonts/genallfont.sh
|
|
```
|
|
|
|
3. Change the language settings
|
|
|
|
To compile the firmware for your language, you need choose a language
|
|
in `Configuration.h`. For Chinese (Taiwan) you would use:
|
|
|
|
```cpp
|
|
#define LCD_LANGUAGE zh_TW
|
|
```
|
|
|
|
4. Compile and Upload the firmware
|
|
|
|
Open `Marlin.ino` in your IDE and compile the firmware. If it's compiled succeeds, upload it to your Arduino hardware.
|
|
|
|
|
|
### Update the language translation
|
|
|
|
If you change the language files, you need to run the script `genallfont.sh`
|
|
again to update the font data file.
|
|
|
|
|
|
### Use a cool font
|
|
|
|
You may need to use a different font to support your own language, because the
|
|
default 9pt font is not complete. (You may also support them by adding the missing
|
|
glyphs to the font.)
|
|
|
|
After you've prepared your font, specify the font file path as an argument to
|
|
`genallfont.sh`, so that the font used for your language is your new font. For
|
|
example, your new font file name is `newfont.bdf`, then run the following command:
|
|
|
|
```bash
|
|
cd Marlin/
|
|
../buildroot/share/fonts/genallfont.sh ./newfont.bdf
|
|
```
|
|
|
|
### Suggestions for Maintainers
|
|
|
|
Even the tool and the language engine can be easily updated,
|
|
since it use the common bitmap font files and UTF-8 text,
|
|
the maintainer need to confirm that the fonts contains the glyph
|
|
in the language files.
|
|
|
|
The font file currently used to generate the font data is the file ISO10646-0-3.bdf,
|
|
which is combined with the Marlin's ISO10646-1 fonts and WQY 9pt bitmap font.
|
|
|
|
### Related resources
|
|
|
|
#### Fonts
|
|
|
|
- [WQY](http://wenq.org/)
|
|
- [WQY 9pt bitmap font](http://wenq.org/daily/wqy-bitmapfont-bdf-gb18030-nightly_build.tar.gz)
|
|
- [unifont (16x8 or 16x16)](http://unifoundry.com/unifont.html)
|
|
|
|
Documents related to the old version of the language engine:
|
|
|
|
- [Marlin Fonts Documentation](http://www.marlinfw.org/docs/development/fonts.html)
|
|
- [Marlin LCD Language](https://github.com/MarlinFirmware/Marlin/wiki/LCD-Language)
|
|
- [U8GLIB](https://github.com/olikraus/u8glib.git)
|
|
- [UTF-8 for U8GLIB](https://github.com/yhfudev/u8glib-fontutf8.git)
|
|
- [Standalone test project for the Marlin UTF-8 language engine](https://github.com/yhfudev/marlin-fontutf8.git)
|