I can hardly believe it’s been 2 and a half years since Gettext 0.17 was released. Maybe time seemed to pass faster because I practically stopped translating GNOME. Anyway, I’d like to share the news with you guys.

The new Language field in the message header is very welcome. Poedit has been doing this for ages, but now it’s official and other localization tools can start using it for spell checking and so on.

I’m not so sure about the utility of the range flag. It’s always good to help translators know what they are translating, but such addition would be much more important for strings (i.e. %s will be replaced by an error message). Anyway, it depends too much on programmers improving old code, so it should appear very slowly.

And of course, I really liked the command line utilities improvement. The colored output is much easier to read, and the msgmerge speedup is just what I needed circa 4 years ago when I had an old budget computer and had to merge partial translations to the GNOME User Guide. It took me something like eight minutes for every merge!

Meanwhile, I continue to wait for some features to be added to intltool:

• Add automatic comments telling where is the message displayed (see also this blog post)
• Sort messages in the same order as they appear in the source code
• Show previous message ID (Damned Lies and Gettext alredy do it)