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Use native gettext for Pinta's translations - #2263

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cameronwhite merged 2 commits into
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feature/libintl
Aug 29, 2026
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Use native gettext for Pinta's translations#2263
cameronwhite merged 2 commits into
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feature/libintl

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  • Related to PR Add an initial version of a preferences dialog #2261, using the native gettext library is the simplest way to also support translations for .ui files - no additional work is needed since GTK already calls dgettext() for any translatable strings when loading the xml file

  • We already bundle libintl with Pinta (since it's required by GTK, libadwaita etc) so this doesn't require any additional packaging. I think the original motivation for using the managed Ngettext library was because we no longer had any bindings to gettext when porting to GTK3 - for GTK2 we used the Mono.Unix.Catalog wrapper for the native library

  • Several of the native methods are already wrapped via GLib and have bindings available (e.g. GLib.Functions.Dgettext()) so this just requires a couple custom bindings for functions like textdomain(). We previously already had one binding for bindtextdomain() to configure libadwaita's translation directory for the macOS app bundle

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- Related to PR #2261, using the native gettext library is the simplest way to also support translations for .ui files - no additional work is needed since GTK already calls dgettext() for any translatable strings when loading the xml file

- We already bundle libintl with Pinta (since it's required by GTK, libadwaita etc) so this doesn't require any additional packaging. I think the original motivation for using the managed Ngettext library was because we no longer had any bindings to gettext when porting to GTK3 - for GTK2 we used the Mono.Unix.Catalog wrapper for the native library

- Several of the native methods are already wrapped via GLib and have bindings available (e.g. GLib.Functions.Dgettext()) so this just requires a couple custom bindings for functions like textdomain(). We previously already had one binding for bindtextdomain() to configure libadwaita's translation directory for the macOS app bundle
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cameronwhite marked this pull request as ready for review August 29, 2026 03:38
@cameronwhite
cameronwhite merged commit 42aa68a into master Aug 29, 2026
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@cameronwhite
cameronwhite deleted the feature/libintl branch August 29, 2026 03:38
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