TADS authoring: Other languages?

Authoring TADS
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  1. Can Tads handle other languages than en_us? I sincerely hope so!

  2. Can Tads mix language encodings?

  3. Can Tads handle text written from right to left?

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  1. Yes, but it requires your library of choice be modified slightly to cooperate with the grammar of your language. Ideally, this is supposed to be modular and simple, but as someone with a bit of experience with this, I find that Adv3Lite has a bit of a partial fusion to English. I don’t know enough about Adv3 to report on it.
  2. As far as your source code is concerned, I don’t think so, but I’m not 100% certain.
  3. This largely depends on the interpreter, I believe.
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To elaborate on the first point:

Generally, someone will have made a modified version of Adv3 or Adv3Lite for a specific language. Given how few TADS 3 authors remain, it’s unlikely that the language selection is wide, and that anybody these languages are based on up-to-date versions of Adv3 or Adv3Lite. I’m not sure where these modified libraries would be hosted.

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There’s a German translation by @Mikawa:

I don’t know about other languages. I think @tomasb was working on a Czech translation a while ago. (Edited to add: Found it! Překlad TADS 3 - tvorba textových adventur v českém jazyce)

According to the docs, you can mix source files with different encodings in a project, but cannot have more than one encoding within a single source file.

If the #charset directive is present at the start of a file, it overrides any -cs option that was specified for the compilation. This makes it easy to mix source files that use different character sets in a single compilation.

An individual file can only use a single character set. It is not possible to switch character sets mid-stream with a new #charset directive.

Quotes from: Source File Character Sets

I haven’t tried it myself, but I think since TADS supports Unicode, you might be able to use that and put the different language elements directly into a single Unicode source file.

Here’s a related post by @RealNC: interactive fiction system for utf-8 RTL languages - #25 by RealNC
I think it depends on the interpreter, as Joey said.

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