Johlero – Cardoen Lieven

This week I have been searching a lot on localization in NSIS. Normally we just used the standard dialogs with a default language depending on where the cd-rom would be used. If we made a cd-rom for French-speaking part of Belguim, then the language was French. If the cd-rom was for Dutch-speaking part of Belguim, the language was Dutch. So no choice could be made at the beginning. If something wasn't spelled right, we went changing some things in the standard language files in the NSIS folder under Program Files. However, with a new update, these files get overwritten, so don't know how to do this good...
A new application that we are creating requires the choice of multiple languages and custom dialogs that need to be localized. I haven't figured it out all, but I'm getting to know more and more about NSIS. I guess this is a problem with all Open Source projects. The people who are creating the Open Source project are so familiar with the project that they don't seem to be able to explain something on the level of a user who's not constantly working with the technology. Most of those people are not stupid, but most of the times there are no simple tutorials available. As a result, you go and ask the most stupid questions on a forum. But it's only months later that you realize that the question was stupid.

I first tried to get the multiple languages working. The wizard of the NSISEclipsePlugin was usefull, however, this wizard generates a script that is failing on a few issues.

First you need to import the files for the languages you want to include.

It took a while until I realised that inserting a macro basically means that you are inserting code out of a nsh file you previously imported. The macro MUI_LANGUAGE obviously comes out of the MUI.nsh file which was previously imported (!include MUI.nsh). If you open MUI.nsh you'll see

If you open System.nsh and search for MUI_LANGUAGE you'll find the macro

So this block of code is inserted where you had !insertmacro MUI_LANGUAGE Dutch. I haven't gone though this code, but it loads the nlf language file and inserts the nsh language script. It basically means that instead of using the macro's you could just put all of the code in your script, resulting however in a script the size of a book. I haven't had time to figure out how all these variables of several language files are managed and how NSIS knows depending on the chosen language where to look for the correct variables. But I will look into it.

Now, to display the choice of language in the beginning you need to put some defines at the beginning of the script that will be used by some macro's.

Then insert the macro

This looks like

Then in the .onInit function we'll insert another macro

which looks like

I'll try to explain this more in later posts, but this gives ou an idea what these macro's are. Actually you don't need to know how they work, but if something goes wrong, or if you want to do custom things, it's really necessary to understand some things.

Most functions in NSIS require that you push variables first and then call the function (Call function).
However, there's another way that's more easy, but requires some preparation.
This is the function:

It concatenates a pushed variable (String in my case) with a variable $LogTemp and stores it in $LogTemp, similar to the ++ operation.

Normally you would have to use it like this:

Now, put on top of your script following code:

Now you can call the function like this:

You'll need nsh.zip and extract it in your plugins directory of NSIS.

A top of your NSIS script put this line of code :

Put following function in your code :

Now you can get the first unused drive lettter of the alphabet like this :

That's it.

More info at http://nsis.sourceforge.net/GetDrives