[artlewis]

When I had DiskWarrior 4.4 rebuild my directory, there are about a dozen items found in "/System/Library/Image Capture/Automatic Tasks/Make PDF.app/Contents/Resources/zh_CN.Iproj/"
The files are captioned, in quotes, as (Chinese-type characters) (3x5 and various other sizes) ..."mkpdf".
Never saw them before.
I saved a screen shot, in case anyone might want to see it.
WTF?
Thanks,

[P]

It's localization resources for that application (or more generally bundle). If you set your Mac to Chinese, it will use those files to show the text.

[artlewis]

Can I just leave them or is it a good idea to toss them, especially since I'll never need Chinese?
thanks,

[Spheric Harlot]

Don't touch the stuff in /System.

Every app has localization resources like that.

There are tools that promise to save disk space by stripping localizations for languages you'll never use; those may render some apps or services unusable, though.

Don't worry about this stuff.

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot 

There are tools that promise to save disk space by stripping localizations for languages you'll never use; those may render some apps or services unusable, though.

For what it's worth, I stripped all none needed languagges from OS X for the last 7 or so years, and never had any issues (that I could trace back to this).

-t

[P]

Don't remove them. In theory it's possible to do so if you'll never use that language, but you save so little and the risk is that you break something. I also think that you might wreck the package signing, but I'm not sure.

turtle: I've never heard of issues with removing localizations, but the apps doing that usually have an option for removing compiler targets, like removing the PPC code from fat binaries or the 32-bit code from apps that will only ever run 64-bit. That is so insanely stupid that I would never trust such an application to do anything - even if you're running on 64-bit, all libraries must have a 32-bit version to be able to be used by 32-bit applications. I know of several people who were forced to reinstall after running one of those applications, because the OS didn't work anymore.

[artlewis]

Thank you for the answers.
I'll just leave them - nothing to gain by removing them.

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by artlewis 

Thank you for the answers.
I'll just leave them - nothing to gain by removing them.

Uhm, in some older systems, you would gain GB of free HD space.
Not sure how that would play out with Mavericks.

-t

[mindwaves]

I used to delete all of them in prior OS X builds with no harm.

[moonmonkey]

Just don't delete the welsh ones - most of OSX's core subsystems are written in welsh so these are needed.

[turtle777]

-t