Provide proper i18n support

[jnehlmeier]

Currently Plotly has poor i18n support.

• You can not change d3 locale (issue How to make localization for type date in axis ? #380)
• Adjustment of rendered precision on date axis does not work when applying custom axis.tickformat if dates need to be rendered differently because of locale. If you want to keep that feature you have to patch hardcoded format strings:

  plotly.js/src/plots/cartesian/axes.js

  Line 879 in ad88139

  var yearFormat = d3.time.format('%Y'),

• Error messages, notifier messages, hover texts for default mode bar buttons are hardcoded in english Localizing modeBarButtons? #288

Currently I have to manually patch plotly for each release, which is pretty annoying.

[etpinard]

Thanks for writing in.

It shouldn't be too hard to pass these locale options in the plot config and have the axes code look up gd._context for their values.

I added a link to a past issue discussing mode bar internationalisation and I marked #380, #288 as duplicate.

[sclausen]

👍 The only thing that keeps us from moving from Highcharts to plotly.js

[etpinard]

@sclausen

us

Who would that be?

[sclausen]

@etpinard my colleagues and me for one or more of our projects in our company

[florianleger]

Hi there,
I've made a fork of Plotly.js to handle french translations and d3 locales for my company:
https://github.com/florianleger/plotly.js
(diff)
I explain in the README how it works and how to add new languages, I thought that it might be helpful to others until a patch came out.

[alexcjohnson]

I believe that between #2195 and #2207 this issue on i18n can be closed - but before I do so, I'd love some 👍 /👎 on the framework from folks who've weighed in here.

I'd also ❤️ if folks who need localization for their own purposes would be willing to PR those back into the main repo - filling in the translations, verifying the date formats, and adding decimal/thousands to the files in lib/locales. The full list of strings we need to translate is in dist/translation_keys.txt. The locale files we have currently are auto-generated from world-calendars which is itself a descendant of https://github.com/kbwood/calendars - but we're certainly happy to accept any other locales you might want to contribute!

@florianleger thanks for pointing out your fork - I did some things the same way, other things differently, but it was very helpful to see what you had done. Does the current master branch of plotly.js work for your purposes now?

[florianleger]

@alexcjohnson My fork does not work with the last release 1.13.2, there is a lot of conflicts and I've not the time to resolve them now...

[alexcjohnson]

@florianleger sorry, what I meant was, can you use plotly.js as of the current master branch - which has not yet been published to npm - WITHOUT forking it? I just want to know if the changes in #2195 and #2207 satisfy your needs (and replace your fork) or if there is anything else we need to consider before publishing this.