Using gnome-doc-utils for help files

Pierre-Antoine pa.lacaze at gmail.com
Thu Jul 5 16:06:48 EDT 2007


Christian Stimming a écrit :
> Am Donnerstag, 5. Juli 2007 16:16 schrieb Josh Sled:
>   
>> Pierre-Antoine Lacaze <pa.lacaze at laposte.net> writes:
>>     
>>> I'm beginning the French translation of Gnucash's help, and have been
>>> suggested that it would be a good move to look into converting
>>> gnucash-help to gnome-doc-utils [1]. g-d-u is supposedly the preferred
>>> way for documentation handling, and make use of po files.
>>>       
>
> Without having looked too much into g-d-u details I'd *strongly* adverse 
> moving our user documentation to po files! Po files are great for smaller 
> chunks of translations which can be translated more or less independent from 
> one another. Our documentation, with the "Guide and Concepts" being the best 
> part of it all, is clearly not at all translatable in a 
> paragraph-by-paragraph way, independently of one another. 
>
> Also, one of the largest advantages of po files, which is the easy 
> visualization of changed strings, becomes moot if these strings are longer 
> than 1-2 lines. For longer strings, po only says "this whole paragraph has 
> changed in *some* way", whereas .xml or .sgml or even .txt would give you a 
> diff showing the exact line that changed. (Diffs are not possible for po.) 
>
> IMHO the arbitrary division of the help documents into separate po strings 
> doesn't offer any advantage at all. I don't agree with this being "a 
> preferred way". Well, maybe for a subset of user documentation: This *might* 
> be suitable to the kind of help you'd expect when pressing F1 somewhere, 
> which gives you 2-3 sentences about what is currently going on. But this is 
> not at all suitable for our large Guide document.
>
>   
>>> I more or less ported it already, and would like to know if there is a
>>> compelling reason not to move over.
>>>
>>> I fear myself with po files the lack of flexibility required in highly
>>> technical, country-specific documentation.
>>>       
>
> If you still think this might be interesting, then I'd be interested to see 
> the .pot file that comes out of the g-d-u conversion (or part of it). I would 
> clearly recommend against it, though.
>
> Regards,
>
> Christian
>   

I suspected so, and pot files indeed look scary and unusable.

Does someone know a good way of handling big doc translation in a
collaborative fashion, without resorting to hard to use tools ? I know
of a wiki engine capable of editing docbooks, or exporting to docbooks.

-- Pierre-Antoine


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