Toni Epple's Blog

If you’ve downloaded the localized edition of the IDE and you create and run a new Platform Application choosing the IDE as the base platform (=the default way) it will be localized as well, but if you create a zip distribution of that same application and run it, localization is gone. I’m not sure, but I think it used to work differently in older versions of NB (but I’m not sure). Anyway, here’s a quick fix:

In NetBeans RCP apps you can have localized resources either inside your modules jar or as a separate jar that sits in a locale directory next to your module. The latter is the way NetBeans itself is localized, so all you need to do is grab those files and put them in your distribution. To do so unzip your zip distribution, go to the relevant cluster directory ( e.g. platform9 ), create a dir named “locale” and copy the localization jars from the matching directory of your IDE installation there.

In case you only want a certain localization, copy the files ending with the respective country code ( “de” for german, so it’s “_de.jar” ).

There is some more detailed information about how to proceed from here in these blogs:

Aljoscha Rittner about how to create an installable language pack (in german)

Which is based on Tonny Kohar’s tips about creating a localization plugin

Disclaimer: This is a quick tip, to keep it short I don’t explain all steps in the same detail as I would in a tutorial. If you need more information to get it running, you’re welcome to write a comment and ask for more details…