"Preferences" menu item on Mac OS: setting QAction::PreferencesRole breaks localization

Violet Giraffe

My application uses my own translator that loads strings from my own localization files (not .qm). No problem here. Now, consider Mac OS: some menu items, like Preferences, About and Exit, need special treatment - they should be placed in the "Application Name" category in the menu. To achieve that, I set the appropriate role for that menu item:

ui.actionPreferences->setMenuRole(QAction::PreferencesRole);

Problem: this works, but when I switch the application to another language, this item is still called "Preferences" - it remains English. Even calling ui.actionPreferences->setText("12345"); after switching the language has no effect.

How can I fix this? The problem is two-fold:

I want to supply my own translations;
even if I'm going to agree on using Qt's default names for these menu items, it's not clear how I can combine that with my own Translator class. Certainly not looking forward to including the .qm files in my .app, either.

mpergand

I think you can access this menu via Cocoa and change the titles yourself.

You can create a special class for calling Cocoa methods like that:
CocoaBridge.h

#ifndef COCOABRIDGE_H
#define COCOABRIDGE_H

class CocoaBridge
{

		CocoaBridge() {}

	public:

    static void setMainMenu();

};

#endif // COCOABRIDGE_H

CocoaBridge.mm

#import <Cocoa/Cocoa.h>

void CocoaBridge::setMainMenu()
{
    NSMenu* menu=[NSApp mainMenu];
    NSMenu* menuApp=[[menu itemAtIndex:0] submenu];  // Application menu
    NSLog(@"%@",[menuApp itemArray]);
// change the titles here
}

You need to add the folowing in your .pro file

macx{

    HEADERS +=		CocoaBridge.h

 OBJECTIVE_SOURCES +=	CocoaBridge.mm 

 LIBS +=		-framework AppKit
}

SGaist

Hi,

See the macOS specifics here for handling the application menu translation.

Violet Giraffe

@SGaist said in "Preferences" menu item on Mac OS: setting QAction::PreferencesRole breaks localization:

Hi,

See the macOS specifics here for handling the application menu translation.

Thank you, great answer as always. Don't know why I couldn't Google that, duh.
Anyway, one thing is unclear from that guide: how can I (if at all possible) retranslate the menus at runtime? My application does support live selection of the language (application relaunch not required).