Important: These files must be UTF-8 formated.

To do this, you can use gedit, oowrite or any text editor that supports UTF-8.

The locale files are a combination letters and configuration files.  

The most important part of these files are levels.  Each level consists of those characters you want dropped at that level.  Do not use quotes and spaces are not allowed.  The levels should be progressive in difficulty; level 1 might only contain upper case ASCII, level 2 might add numerals, level 3 might add lower case, and so on.  There is currently a hard limit of 9 levels; this is simply because the scoring graphic does not extent beyond 9.  If someone generates scoring icons beyond 9, I'll be happy to increase the level limit.  Look at gletters.cz and gletters.ja for examples.

You as the translator should provide sufficient levels to be challenging in your native alphabet or alphabets.  gletters is currently limited to at most 9 levels of play.  Each level drops characters more frequently and faster than the previous level.

Scoring and progression to the next level is based on the number of characters at the current level.

If you skip a level, gletters will use default POSIX/ASCII upper case letters for that level.

Keymaps allow you to map characters that need to be composed via either alternate input methods, AltGr key or some such method to keyboard keys.  For examples of this, look at gletters.ja and gletters.cz.

If your native alphabet uses only latin letters with perhaps some accents (as in the majority of Western European languages) you may not need a keymap.  If your native alphabet uses additional or different characters you need to map those characters to keys normally found on your keyboard.  Since gletters does not recognize alternate input methods, you must explicitly map alternate alphabets to latin letters.

A keymap essentially allows a single key to "pop" multiple characters.  You do not need to map upper and lower case letters normally found in your locate; gletters checks for case automatically according to the rules of the locale.

Because alternate keyboards can be considerably slower, especially for beginning users, there are two special keywords that can be used to control how fast characters fall and how fast they are dropped.

The fallrate is the rate at which letters fall.  The smaller the numbers, the faster the letters fall.  The first number is the base; the second number is the variability by level.  You should start with the sum of the numbers around 140 and experiment to find an appropriate fall speed for your users.

The droprate is the rate at which letters are dropped.  The smaller the numbers, the more letters drop.  The first number is the base; the second number is the variability by level.  You should start with the sum of the numbers around 9000 and experiment to find an appropriate drop rate for your users.

Gletters was written to try and keep going even if there are errors in the config files.  If things don't work as you expect, gletters does try to print warnings about things it doesn't understand in the config files; look at the output generated by gcompris before filing a bug report.  If you file a bug report, please include your gletters.xx file, and any output generated by gcompris.

Known bugs

If you have characters in your level set that are not in your locale, they may not be rendered full-size.  This appears to be a pango bug, not a gcompris bug.

Report bugs in UTF-8 implementation to gcompris-devel@lists.sourceforge.net and cc yan@seiner.com 
UTF-8 mods to gletters.c (C) Yan Seiner 2004
Released under the same GPL license as gcompris
