Custom Text Settings

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The Custom Text feature of MainBoss has two basic uses:

You can customize MainBoss's terminology to match the terminology used by your organization. For example, instead of "Cost Center" your organization may prefer to use the term "Department." This feature lets you tell MainBoss to use "Department" wherever it usually uses "Cost Center".
You can change MainBoss to use some other language instead of English.

Note: MainBoss supplies custom settings for a limited set of non-English languages. If you want to work in some other language, you must create your own file of custom translations.

Message Files: The text messages used by MainBoss are stored in files called message files. This includes any customized text you define as well as the "standard" text messages used by MainBoss. There are "standard" message files for English, French, German, Spanish, and any other languages supported by your version of MainBoss. These standard files are stored in the same directory that contains your MainBoss software.

Message files have names of the form msg####.txt where the # characters are numbers. The numbers correspond to Microsoft's conventions for "numbering" languages. For example, "basic" English is 0009, Canadian English is 1009, United Kingdom English is 0809 and so on. Therefore, a message file corresponding to Canadian English would have the name msg1009.txt.

When MainBoss begins executing, it checks the language settings of your Windows system. (You set these in the Regional Settings entry of the Windows Control Panel.) MainBoss then checks to see if you have a message file corresponding to your current chosen language.

For example, suppose you have set your Windows language settings to German (Austrian). MainBoss checks to see if there is an appropriate message file for Austrian German on your system (msg0c07.txt). If so, MainBoss uses the custom text settings in that file. If not, MainBoss looks for a generic German file (msg0007.txt). If that doesn't exist either, then MainBoss uses a standard base file named msg0000.txt (which represents U.S. English).

To specify your own custom text, you create an override file. This is a file of messages that override MainBoss's default messages. Override files are created in the directory that contains your MainBoss database. Override files have names of the form ovr####.txt, where the numbers #### again correspond to Microsoft's conventions for numbering languages.

Warning: Any customizations made with MainBoss 2.5 or earlier cannot be carried over into this version of MainBoss. If you want to have those customizations, you must do them again using the current version of MainBoss.

For Translators: We have prepared a special white paper on translating texts into a new language. If you intend to work on such a translation, please contact us and we will be happy to provide this information.

It is important to remember that MainBoss uses whatever message file is most appropriate to the Regional Settings in your Windows control panel. For example, if you create a new message file for German (Austrian) but your Regional Settings say German (Standard), you will not see the new messages you have created.

Note: Translators may find the /LANGID: command line option useful for testing message files. For more information, see The MainBoss Command Line.

U.S. English: If you want to create a new set of messages and your Regional Settings in the Windows control panel are English (United States), create an English 0009 message file if one doesn't already exist. Then make your changes in this message file. Note that these changes will affect all versions of English unless overridden by another message file. For example, if a user's Regional Settings language is English (Australian), MainBoss will use the settings in English 0009 unless there is a specific English (Australian) 0c09 message file.

Note: If you make changes in a message file, you will not immediately see the changes in MainBoss. You must quit MainBoss and start again; then you should see the changes you have made.

Language Code: The best way to determine what code number is associated with a particular language or regional setting is to look at the list in MainBoss itself. To do this, follow these steps:

Login as ADMINISTRATOR as described in Accessing Administration Functions.
Select Administration —> Preferences —> Custom Text from the menu. This opens the custom text window.
Click Create Custom. This displays a list of all recognized regional settings and their associated code numbers.

Commonly used codes include:

0007		German
0009		English
000a		Spanish
000c		French
0016		Portuguese

Note that there are regional variations for all of these. For example, 000c is the generic code for French, but 0c0c stands for French-Canadian while 080c stands for Belgian French.