cadcraft/docs/localization-parity.md

Localization parity

Last reviewed: 2026-10-10 · Last updated: 2026-10-11 · Change: minor (German catalog landed: second non-English language, per-language plural rules) · Target: Autodesk AutoCAD 2027 for Mac (26.0)

How far CADCraft's interface and drawing text are from AutoCAD's languages. Summarised in ROADMAP.md; work items in gaps.md.

What the target ships

Measured from the installed AutoCAD 2027 for Mac bundle by listing only (folder names, nothing read): Contents/Resources has Base.lproj (English), de, es, fr, it, ja, ko and zh_CN localizations, and Resources/Support has matching @de@ … @zh_CN@ folders. That is 8 interface languages on the Mac. AutoCAD for Windows also has language packs for Traditional Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Czech and Hungarian (Autodesk's published language-pack list, not measured here). AutoCAD's spell checker ships about 20 dictionaries (*.dct names in Resources/Support).

Drawing text in AutoCAD: TrueType and SHX big fonts (CJK), Unicode \U+ escapes, complex-script shaping and right-to-left text through TrueType, vertical SHX text styles.

What CADCraft has

• A display-time string catalog (crates/ui-egui/src/i18n/, landed with #36): a TSV per language (context, English source, translation, @plural rows), Edit → Interface Language with Auto (system language), live switching, a saved choice, and tests for coverage, placeholders and plurals (localization.md). The Ukrainian and German catalogs have 989 rows each, covering menus, command labels, tool groups and tooltips, the Start page, tabs, status controls, object snaps, drafting prompts, property labels and dialogs. Engine diagnostics, CLI/MCP responses and command history stay English, and uncatalogued text falls back to English. For scale: about 1,160 unique capitalised string literals exist in crates/engine and crates/ui-egui (grep, 2026-10-10).
• Drawing text: TrueType/OpenType/.ttc through skrifa with per-character font fallback and FONTALT, so CJK characters render (#173). DXF text is written with \U+ escapes so non-ASCII survives in R2000 files (#169). Lines with right-to-left text get the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm and OpenType shaping with harfrust (Arabic, Persian and Urdu joining, lam-alef, ZWNJ, marks; Hebrew), in TEXT and MTEXT including wrapping (#287). Left-to-right lines are still placed one glyph per code point: no shaping for Devanagari and other Indic scripts, and no vertical text. SHX fonts are not read; our stroke font stands in.
• Text input: egui/winit IME. Several upstream IME fixes are queued as PRs (#110–#119: macOS Korean, emoji picker, Windows caret placement, X11 and Wayland), so CJK input is not yet reliable on every platform.

Languages

Order and columns from craftrules' progress-docs standard. Every UI percentage is measured from the catalogs (0 rows for every language without a catalog file). Hours are estimated: about 3–5 h per language for an Opus 5.5 agent to translate the ~990 catalog rows and fix layout, plus native review by a human; extending the catalog to the remaining English-only strings (engine diagnostics, uncatalogued text) is about 4–6 h, counted once in the first row.

Language	Code	UI strings translated	Dialogs / tooltips / help	Script support	Native review	Status	Estimate to full
English	en	source (100%)	100% (help is a command reference, not AutoCAD-sized help)	Latin: yes	n/a	full	—
Simplified Chinese	zh-Hans	0 (0%)	0%	CJK glyphs render via fallback; IME fixes pending (#110–#119); no vertical text	no	none	8–12 h (includes extending the catalog, 4–6 h)
Spanish	es	0 (0%)	0%	Latin: yes	no	none	3–5 h
Hindi	hi	0 (0%)	0%	Devanagari: no shaping	no	none	3–5 h + 15–25 h shaping (shared with Arabic)
Arabic	ar	0 (0%)	0%	Drawing text shaped and laid out right to left (#287); the UI is not mirrored	no	none	3–5 h + 15–25 h RTL UI
French	fr	0 (0%)	0%	Latin: yes	no	none	3–5 h
Portuguese	pt	0 (0%)	0%	Latin: yes	no	none	3–5 h
Indonesian	id	0 (0%)	0%	Latin: yes	no	none	3–5 h
Japanese	ja	0 (0%)	0%	CJK glyphs render; IME pending; no vertical text	no	none	4–6 h
German	de	989 catalog rows (≈ 100% of the catalog; ≈ 80% of all UI strings, estimated: engine diagnostics and uncatalogued text stay English)	dialogs and tooltips yes; command reference searchable in German	Latin: yes (bundled egui fonts cover ä ö ü Ä Ö Ü ß; long strings will need layout checks)	no native review	partial	1–2 h
Korean	ko	0 (0%)	0%	Hangul renders; macOS Korean IME fixes pending (#118, #119)	no	none	4–6 h
Vietnamese	vi	0 (0%)	0%	Latin with stacked diacritics: renders per code point, untested	no	none	3–5 h
Ukrainian	uk	989 catalog rows (≈ 100% of the catalog; ≈ 80% of all UI strings, estimated: engine diagnostics and uncatalogued text stay English)	dialogs and tooltips yes; command reference searchable in Ukrainian	Cyrillic: yes (bundled egui fonts)	translated by a contributor; no second review	partial	2–4 h

Other languages shipped: Ukrainian, Brazilian Portuguese and German (all partial). AutoCAD for Mac ships 7 non-English languages (zh-Hans, es, fr, ja, de, ko, it); of those, CADCraft now ships German, and additionally Ukrainian, which AutoCAD for Mac doesn't ship.

Total to put all twelve at full: about 55–95 Opus 5.5 hours (catalog extension 4–6 h, ten translations 30–50 h, complex-script shaping and RTL 30–45 h), plus native-speaker review for each language, which needs humans. Translations parallelise fully once the catalog exists.

Revision history

Date	Change	Summary
2026-10-11	minor	German catalog landed: de preference and catalog, per-language plural rules; non-English languages 1 → 2; total hours 60–100 → 55–95
2026-10-10	minor	Right-to-left drawing text: bidi and Arabic-script shaping in TEXT and MTEXT (#287)
2026-10-10	minor	Ukrainian catalog landed on main (#36): catalog infrastructure exists, Ukrainian partial; total hours 70–110 → 60–100
2026-10-10	major	First localization measurement against AutoCAD 2027 for Mac's bundle localizations