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Inspiring
August 18, 2023
Open for Voting

Option to switch language for default/automatic layer names separately from UI language

  • August 18, 2023
  • 0 replies
  • 234 views

Simply separate the language selection into UI language and Layer Language. Layer Language will affect the default names of layers like "Background", "Layer 1", "Group 1", "Curves 1", etc. This would make it possible to use actions made for foreign languages without affecting the language of your entire photoshop UI. I cannot explain the pain of using photoshop with a language you don't speak.

 

 

And before anyone tells me to "download better actions", because actions should raname their layers as they create them or use relative layer selection, let me explain my situation:

 

Me and my colleagues work with foreign clients, who supply their own actions that fit their demands. These actions are made in italian photoshop and therefore assume italian layer names, and break on any other language. We could fix a few actions, but as we have dozens of projects with multiple action files containing hundreds of individual actions each, it is just not feasible, especially since the clients may sometimes make revisions to their actions, undoing out "translation" work. Therefore we are all forced to use an italian photoshop, when none of us actually speak the language, which is a difficulty in itself.

 

I have tried to write a script that would automatically translate the layer names into english, but I have been unsuccessful, because parsing the actions files and replacing words breaks the code (for example when replacing "Curves" with "Curve", it replaces not only the strings for the layer names, but pieces of code too). Also the scripts from Xtools that convert .ATN files to and from .XML crash on most of our action files.