Best Circuit Design Software

[Simon]

well all they need to do is code in one place  why the hell paste the thing all over the place ? surely that is wasting time ? it looks like the project has been handed from people to people as different people have headed the project

[djsb]

^^^
And unnecessary error messages kept springing up! Such as something about no schematic file being available before saving it!

You can safely ignore that,just one of It's quirks. There are tutorials on the web. Just google 'Kicad tutorial'.

[djsb]

The development effort was originally organised via a yahoo group which was closed down only recently in favour of the Launchpad site.
The main developers involved have not changed at all (lead developer is Jean-Pierre Charras). It's just as more people where getting involved the traffic on the yahoo group was becoming unmanageable. The Lauchpad site had more facilities for manageing different branches of the code and keeping track of things. So everyone decided to move there. Things are getting done and thats the main thing, even though it may appear a bit chaotic on the surface.
I suppose this is the nature of small open source projects.

[Simon]

right, I emailed Jean Pierre and just got a reply saying "we always need translators" and that was it, not very encouraging.

@thewelly there is a PDF manual for each application, I've not found any bugs so far but I've hardly scratched the surface

[djsb]

Best thing is join the kicad users group and ask how the translation is carried out. There are a few posts relating to .po and .mo files. I'm sure that the people who have done a similar job will be able to help. I was just involved in the help file translation and not the translation of the menu's etc in the software itself.

[Simon]

yea well you'd hope someone that tells you that they always need translators and heads the project to be a bit more proactive in welcoming people on board, translating will not benefit me at all as I'm a native brit but I know that there are a few talented people buried in Italy and so if I helped make the program more accessible to them they may contribute and we would all benefit

[Bloch]

I did offer to help translate KiCAD to Italian but have not got much of a reply back, anyone know how to get into this (I know someone on here helped with the spanish side of it). the more people that can use it the more chance of it being developed.

If you are looking into this ?

I found this folder http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~kicad-testing-committers/kicad/testing/files/head:/Documentation/
and this file http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~kicad-testing-committers/kicad/testing/annotate/head%3A/Documentation/GUI_Translation_HOWTO.pdf

The best part was this...

The different menus and tool tips in KiCad are internationalized, and can be easily translated into a local language without source code modifications.

[Simon]

yea I'm in contact with them