Changing menu language on Mac

[John Ralls]

On Nov 13, 2009, at 3:11 PM, James Wilde wrote:

>
> On Nov 13, 2009, at 23:24 , John Ralls wrote:
>
>>>>
>>> Thanks, John.
>>>
>>> I'm using the standalone Gnucash.app.  Fink is not available as a  
>>> binary yet for Snow Leopard and I'm not yet sufficiently up to  
>>> speed on the Mac to risk installing from source.
>>>
>>> My Mac settings for locale are that the language is English, but  
>>> date, money and sort order are custom, tending to the Swedish, and  
>>> keyboard is Swedish.  Actually, if I run 'locale' I see that  
>>> everything is "C" except LC_CTYPE which is UTF-8.
>>>
>>> James
>>
>> James,
>>
>> Gnucash.app doesn't use the results from "locale", which is a good  
>> thing because it produces rather weird results. Gnucash.app uses  
>> defaults read .GlobalDefaults for AppleLocale (to get the principal  
>> locale and currency setting) and AppleCollationOrder (For the sort  
>> sequence).
>>
>> How do you create a custom sort order?
>>
>> What else seems buggy to you?
>>
>> Regards,
>> John Ralls
>>
> been
>>
> "Gnucash.app uses defaults read .GlobalDefaults for AppleLocale " -  
> that sounds like something it'd be a lot of hassle to edit!  As I  
> say, I'm new to the Mac - only had this one just over a week.  Is  
> there any way I can set up some kind of script which sets the  
> language and starts GC?  A bit like a shell script in unix or a bat  
> file in Windows.
>

Sure. Just edit Gnucash.app/Contents/MacOS/Gnucash. It's a unix (bash)  
shell script.
But the defaults commands are just reading back what you put in the  
Languages and Text system prefs box and the startup script turns them  
into environment variables for GC to use. If you're comfortable  
writing shell scripts you'll see pretty quickly what's going on.

> When I said that date, money and sort order are custom, I should  
> have been clearer.  These all appear on the same configuration  
> screen - I think sort order was on that screen - and since I changed  
> some of them, the whole page is considered as 'custom' although the  
> sort sequence is pure Swedish, so that the special swedish letters,  
> å, ä and ö come at the end of the alphabet and not as a, a and o  
> respectively.
> with

OK, does `defaults read .GlobalPreferences AppleCollationOrder` return  
"sv"? If so, that's passed into GC and you should be fine.

> As to buggy, it's early days, but some of the windows appeared to be  
> fixed together in a strange manner, for example the hints at start  
> screen disappeared off to the left when the main window opened, and  
> then suddenly followed the main window when I moved that.  One or  
> two other windows opened behind the main window.  Not sure they were  
> GC windows.  I haven't started posting to accounts yet, but I had a  
> job to get my data from the Ubuntu machine onto this one.  In the  
> end I created a new set of accounts in an empty directory called  
> accounts - the same name as I had had before on the Ubuntu machine -  
> then renamed that directory to accounts.new and renamed my ex-Ubuntu  
> directory with all the live data from accounts.ubuntu to the name I  
> had used for creating the new accounts.  It seemed to work.  But the  
> whole doesn't yet - after ten minutes of messing about - seem quite  
> as slick as it did on Ubuntu, which is why I'm wondering about  
> creating a Ubuntu virtual machine and running GC in that  
> environment.  But I'll put it through its paces a bit more before I  
> decide finally, and make sure I take lots of backups

The window placement at startup is a known problem with gtk-quartz,  
but it doesn't seem to cause any real problems. You should be able to  
just copy your account files from Ubuntu to Mac and open them with GC.  
They're text XML files and move around just fine. (I do this for  
testing.)

Agreed that there are "slickness" issues with gtk-quartz -- the one  
that bugs me the most is that pasting doesn't work into register- 
window cells.

>
> If you - or anyone else - has any ideas about how to create a start- 
> up script on the Mac I'll be very grateful.
>
> TIA
>
> James