[haiku-development] Re: Fwd: [haiku-doc] Organizing translations of User Guide/Welcome Package
- From: Humdinger <humdingerb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 03 Jan 2009 10:40:53 +0100
Niels Reedijk wrote:
> SOURCE FORMAT
> Docbook
> The major advantage is
> that as a writer you can focus on content. There is a fixed set of
> mark up elements that everyone will use. This will lead to consistency
> in structure.
I can see the benefit of that. Especially "entities" allow for defining and globally
change certain expressions or their output. For example, I'd love to have keyboard
shortcuts as little key-images and the reader could even choose if he uses ALT or CTRL.
On the other hand, seeing the insanely long tag names ([paragraph] instead of <p>) I have
to wonder if it isn't quite tedious to write.
Also many people are more or less familiar with HTML. <ul><ol> and a <table> here and
there and that's all there is to our user guide. Seeing these unfamiliar tags may deter
volunteers.
Most importantly, with the current XHTML you can see your changes immediately by reloading
the page in a browser. Docbook will have to go through some converting, right?
At work we use some XML based system with a crappy editor to insert structures and tags.
It's sometimes quite annoying that you have to work in such rigid structures. You can't
just insert anything wherever you like. I understand the reasons behind this, but you
always hit exceptions to the rule where it would be so much better to just get your way.
I'm not sure we should submit ourselves to this kind of strict rules.
> To do for this sollution:
> - Convert the user guide from html to docbook
As you can imagine, I'm not thrilled doing that. Is there a converter that could at least
help doing most of the grunt work?
> - Write a CSS to tweak the output
Do you have to completely define every tag or is there some standard-layout of
elements?
BTW: http://factory.haiku-os.org/documentation/HIG/ch04s02.html doesn't look right. Or is
the meaning of a shortcut supposed to be in a new row?
> HOW TO TECHNICALLY TRANSLATE
---
> Now the intermediate format I want to propose is the gettext
> format[6].
As these technicalities are out of my experience, I leave it to others to comment on that.
I'm confident, that there exist solutions to output new or changed text passages for
translation and integrate them back into their respective language files.
> LOGISTICS OF TRANSLATION
---
> Now on the first thing, the suggestion above takes care of how to, and
> what to translate. The major advantage of translating po files is that
> it is a translator specific file, without many of the technicalities
> of HTML or docbook. Even though it has a learning curve, I think it
> will be easier.
These po files sure do look intimidating. Maybe you're right and after a while you get
used to it. Especially technically versed people (which arguably are the kind of people
Haiku will attract mostly until R1) will probably get the hang of it. OTOH, these people
tend to get bored with this kind of stuff.
Enthusiastic end user types often just go ahead, take the original HTML and translate
paragraph by paragraph, page by page.
> The final issue, how to submit translations, is a final thing I want
> to comment on. Since a part of the process can be automated, which
> means that whenever changes have been made to the original
> documentation, these can be forwarded to the translated po files, it
> would be easiest if translators have continuous access to their
> translations. I'd say, let's keep translations in a separate
> repository, a mercurial repository hosted on repos.haiku-os.org.
As on the other technicalities, I don't feel knowledgeable enough to comment.
> Finally, I do not want to force any workflow on you.
As I have no experience with concurrent translations I appreciate your input, considering
your work with KDE. My suggestions were just a (naive) shot to get the ball rolling.
Already having a ton of documentation in XHTML doesn't help should we decide to switch to
Docbook and waiting until the first translations roll in to add to that isn't either...
However, I don't think this is a decision to be taken lightly by two guys. Even more so if
one of them is me. :)
> If you do decide
> you want to try this one out, I will offer to free up time in the
> coming two months to work this out with you, so that eventually you
> are able to steer this process yourself.
If the decision is to go that route, I'll try my best to learn all that's necessary.
Though secretly I hope all the kinks will have been worked out and automation will take
care of the technical parts by then...
Regards,
Humdinger
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