This file is mandatory.

The LANGUAGE file contains the self descripted name of the language. It should contain a native representation first, and in parenthesis an english translation after that. Example:

Deutsch (German)

This file should be present.

The charset file describes which charset a language package is written in and applies to all other language files in the package. It is possible to write some language packages without an explicit charset, but it is still strongly recommended. You'll never know in what environment your language package will be used, and neither UTF-8 nor Latin1 are guaranteed.

The whole content of this file is a string that can be recognized as a valid charset encoding. Example:

UTF-8

This file is mandatory.

The central translation file. It is essentially an inline Perl script autogenerated by locales.pl. To generate it, generate the directory and the two files mentioned above, and execute the following command:

scripts/locales.pl <langcode>

Otherwise you can simply copy one of the other languages. You will be told how many are missing like this:

$ scripts/locales.pl en
English - 0.6% - 2015/2028 missing

A file named "missing" will be generated and can be edited. You can also edit the "all" file directly. Edit everything you like to fit the target language and execute locales.pl again. See how the missing words get fewer.

Legacy code from SQL Ledger. It provides a means for numbers to be converted into natural language, like 1523 => one thousand five hundred twenty three. If you want to provide it, it must be inlinable Perl code which provides a num2text sub. If an init sub exists it will be executed first.

Only used in the check and receipt printing module.

kivitendo comes with a lot of interfaces to different formats, some of which are rather picky with their accepted charset. The special_chars file contains a listing of chars not suited for different file format and provides substitutions. It is written in "Simple Ini" style, containing a block for every file format.

First entry should be the order of substitution for entries as a whitespace separated list. All entries are interpolated, so \n, \x20 and \\ all work.

After that every entry is a special char that should be translated when writing text into such a file.

Example:

[Template/XML]
order=& < > \n
&=&amp;
<=&lt;
>=&gt;
\n=<br>

Note the importance of the order in this example. Substituting < and > befor & would lead to $gt; become &amp;gt;

For a list of valid formats, see the German special_chars entry. As of this writing the following are recognized:

HTML
URL@HTML
Template/HTML
Template/XML
Template/LaTeX
Template/OpenDocument
filenames

The last of which is very machine dependant. Remember that a lot of characters are forbidden by some filesystems, for exmaple MS Windows doesn't like ':' in its files where Linux doesn't mind that. If you want the files created with your language pack to be portable, find all chars that could cause trouble.

This file is not a part of the language package itself.

This is a file generated by scripts/locales.pl while processing your locales. It's only to have the missing entries singled out and does not belong to a language package.

This file is not a part of the language package itself.

Another file generated by scripts/locales.pl. If for any reason a translation does not appear anymore and can be deleted, it gets moved here. The last 50 or so entries deleted are saved here in case you made a typo, so that you don't have to translate everything again. If a tranlsation is missing, the lost file is checked first. If you maintain a language package, you might want to keep this safe somewhere.