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