cadcraft/docs/localization-parity.md

Localization parity

Last reviewed: 2026-10-13 · Last updated: 2026-10-13 · Change: minor (re-audit against main e707ab4d: Chinese, Spanish and Arabic catalogs added to the table, row counts re-measured, reference-catalog lag measured, totals recomputed) · 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 twelve catalogs have between 1,003 (French) and 1,322 rows (Ukrainian, the reference), counted 2026-10-13, 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, and wide East Asian characters in it fill the square cells a big font would give them (#861).
• Text input: egui/winit IME. The upstream IME fixes (macOS Korean, emoji picker, Windows caret placement, X11 and Wayland) were proposed as PRs #110–#119, which were closed in favour of the consolidated, still open PR #668, 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 ~1,300 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	1,112 catalog rows; 210 reference rows untranslated (English fallback)	partial	CJK glyphs render via the CJK interface fonts loaded in every language (#861); IME fixes pending (#668); no vertical text	contributed by @mayloglog (#684); no native review recorded	partial	2–4 h + native review
Spanish	es	1,239 catalog rows; 87 reference rows untranslated	dialogs and tooltips yes	Latin: yes	contributed by @PedroGuille (#610) and extended by @diegozpy (#680); no native review recorded	partial	1–2 h
Hindi	hi	0 (0%)	0%	Devanagari: no shaping	no	none	3–5 h + 15–25 h shaping (shared with Arabic)
Arabic	ar	1,229 catalog rows; 99 reference rows untranslated	partial	Drawing text shaped and laid out right to left (#287); interface fonts for Arabic on Linux, Windows and macOS; the UI is not mirrored (reading labels right to left is open PR #996)	contributed by @hasan-sdaif (#798); no native review recorded	partial	1–2 h + 15–25 h RTL UI
French	fr	1,003 catalog rows; 319 reference rows untranslated	partial	Latin: yes	contributed by @pechnikov2026-star (#624); no native review yet	partial	2–4 h
Russian	ru	1,004 catalog rows; 318 reference rows untranslated	partial	Cyrillic: yes (bundled egui fonts)	contributed by @pechnikov2026-star (#624); no native review yet	partial	2–4 h
Indonesian	id	0 (0%)	0%	Latin: yes	no	none	3–5 h
Japanese	ja	0 (0%)	0%	CJK glyphs render; IME pending (#668); no vertical text	no	none	4–6 h
German	de	1,030 catalog rows; 292 reference rows untranslated (it had 989, the whole catalog, on 2026-10-11)	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	2–4 h
Korean	ko	1,235 catalog rows (1,229 ordinary, 4 menu, 2 count); 95 reference rows untranslated	dialogs, tooltips, Options and translated command-reference labels	UI requires catalog-covering installed or optional craft-fonts Hang/Kore face; English fallback without one; IME fixes still pending	original AI-assisted translation; independent native proofreading pending	complete when it landed; reference rows added since fall back to English	native review + platform layout/IME validation
Vietnamese	vi	0 (0%)	0%	Latin with stacked diacritics: renders per code point, untested	no	none	3–5 h
Ukrainian	uk	1,322 catalog rows (the reference catalog; every new command needs a row here)	dialogs and tooltips yes; command reference searchable in Ukrainian	Cyrillic: yes (bundled egui fonts)	translated by a contributor; no second review	partial (≈ 80% of all UI strings, estimated: engine diagnostics and uncatalogued text stay English)	2–4 h
Portuguese (Brazilian)	pt-BR	1,240 catalog rows; 86 reference rows untranslated	dialogs and tooltips yes	Latin: yes (bundled egui fonts; accented letters tested)	@WladmirJunior and @RicSchonfelder (AI-assisted); no native proofreading pass	complete when it landed (#791); reference rows added since fall back to English	native review
Czech	cs	1,214 catalog rows; 116 reference rows untranslated	dialogs and tooltips yes; contextual menu headings; command reference searchable in Czech	Latin: yes (bundled egui proportional and monospace fonts; Czech letters and quotes tested)	AI-assisted by @Losminek; independent review pass; not yet proofread by a native speaker	complete when it landed; reference rows added since fall back to English	native review + shared English-only UI work
Swedish	sv	1,235 catalog rows; 95 reference rows untranslated	dialogs and tooltips yes; contextual menu headings; command reference searchable in Swedish	Latin: yes (bundled egui proportional and monospace fonts; å ä ö é and Swedish quotes tested)	AI-assisted (Claude Code) by @holmbom; terminology and the running app reviewed by a native speaker	complete when it landed; reference rows added since fall back to English	line-by-line proofreading + shared English-only UI work
Italian	it	1,231 catalog rows; 93 reference rows untranslated	dialogs and tooltips yes; contextual menu headings (Visualizza / Vista, Edita / Modifica); command reference searchable in Italian	Latin: yes (bundled egui fonts; accented letters tested)	AI-assisted by Emanuele Bottelli (Claude), written from the English strings with Italian desktop-CAD vocabulary; no native proofreading pass yet	complete when it landed; reference rows added since fall back to English	native review + shared English-only UI work

"Rows" are the catalog's lines that are neither comments nor blank (ordinary, menu and @plural rows), counted on 2026-10-13. "Reference rows untranslated" compares each catalog's (context, English source) keys with Ukrainian's, the reference that every new command must extend: 75 of those rows (for example the 3D Mouse dialog, Align Multileaders, the Block Editor prompt) are missing from every other catalog, so those labels show in English there. The test suite reports such gaps but doesn't fail on them.

Languages shipped (LANGUAGES in crates/ui-egui/src/i18n/mod.rs): Ukrainian, Brazilian Portuguese, German, Spanish, Czech, Russian, French, Simplified Chinese, Italian, Korean, Swedish and Arabic, twelve catalogs. Engine diagnostics and uncatalogued text remain English. AutoCAD for Mac ships 7 non-English languages (zh-Hans, es, fr, ja, de, ko, it); CADCraft ships six of them (all but Japanese), and additionally Ukrainian, Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Russian, Swedish and Arabic, which AutoCAD for Mac doesn't ship.

Total to put the languages at full: about 62–102 Opus 5.5 hours, summed from the table's estimates (catalog extension 4–6 h, four languages not started 13–21 h, closing the reference-catalog gaps of the eleven partial or lagging catalogs 15–30 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
2026-10-13	minor	Re-audit against main e707ab4d: Chinese (#684), Spanish (#610, #680) and Arabic (#798) rows filled in from the catalogs; row counts re-measured for all twelve; each catalog's untranslated reference rows measured; German and the "complete" catalogs no longer called complete; PRs #110–#119 noted as closed in favour of #668; total hours recomputed (55–95 → 62–102)
2026-10-13	minor	Swedish added: 1,235 rows, one/other plurals, menu headings, locale/preferences/menu/font/render tests; no gaps in the marked UI literals; terminology and the running app reviewed by a native speaker
2026-10-13	minor	Korean added: full 1,235-row existing catalog union, single count form, locale/persistence/live-switch tests, and validated Hangul UI fonts; native review and platform verification pending
2026-10-12	minor	Italian added: 1,227 rows, one/other plurals, two menu headings, locale/preference/plural/font tests; AI-assisted, native proofreading pending
2026-10-12	minor	Brazilian Portuguese catalog completed by @RicSchonfelder: 238 rows added (1,231 total), now covering the reference catalog and every marked UI literal, gaps 0; bundled-font glyph test for the catalog's accented letters
2026-10-11	minor	Czech added: 1,202 rows, one/few/other plurals, locale/preferences/menu/font/render tests; independent review pass; native proofreading pending
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