Internationalization and Localization (i18n/L10n)

This page includes notes and links for using L’ânePOS in various localized environments. If you have any information or translations to add, feel free to email me.

Encoding

You must specify the database character encoding scheme at the time of the “create database” statement. The default encoding is usually “SQL-ASCII”. Only people using 7-bit ASCII should use the “SQL-ASCII” character encoding, everyone else should use the correct encoding for the database’s automatic encoding conversion to work. Furthermore, PostgreSQL does not use the ISO encoding names, it uses the “Latin” aliases (ie “Latin9” for ISO-8859-15).

Euro (€) Support

Presently, L’ânePOS only supports a single currency. Foreign currencies are converted to the base currency for storage and manipulation. As such, L’ânePOS’s currency support may not be sufficient for transitional euro support in euro-zone countries. For more information, visit the EU’s euro pages at Europa (the EU online).

The printer drivers will convert the international currency symbol (¤) to the euro (€) or specifically $printer->{'codes'}{'euro'} (which is actually a lower case “e” in the generic/super class driver).

All euro locales should use the standard euro money format: €1 234.56 That is a euro prefix, a space thousands separator, a period decimal separator, and no suffix (this is available in the “int-EURO” overlay locale). To override the standard display/print format, use one of the overlay locales (“int-EURO.ISO” or “int-EURO.REVISO”).

Site-Specific Customization

To change the prompts for your site only, you should create a new locale. Do not change the text of the L’âne-provided strings, as they are replaced by the installer with every new release.

For example, you might create a locale x-site-en-US to hold custom locale text. To use this locale, prepend x-site-en-US to you LaneLocale environment variable. Thus, the variable might then be: x-site-en-US,en-US,c

Locale Status

The locale datasets are now included in the release in the directory $LaneRoot/backOffice/utilities/locale-datasets/ as locale-dataset-lang.sql where lang is the two-letter language code.

1. The user documentation does not exist, so no locale (including U.S. English) includes localized user documentation.

	Translated
Locale	Register	Back Office	User Docs1
en, English
en-AU, English in Australia	Partial	Partial	No
en-CA, English in Canada	Partial	Partial	No
en-IE, English in Ireland	Partial	Partial	No
en-IN, English in India	Partial	Partial	No
en-NZ, English in New Zealand	Partial	Partial	No
en-UK, English in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland	Partial	Partial	No
en-US, English in the United States of America	Yes	Yes	No
en-ZA, English in South Africa	Partial	Partial	No
int, International Locales
int-EURO, Standard Euro-Zone Locales	Yes	Yes	No
int-EURO.ISO, Standard Euro-Zone Locales, ASCII ISO Format	Yes	Yes	No
int-EURO.REVISO, Standard Euro-Zone Locales, ASCII ISO Format, Reversed	Yes	Yes	No
nl, Dutch
nl-BE, Dutch in Belgium	Yes	Yes	No
nl-NL, Dutch in the Netherlands	Yes	Yes	No