is poedit acceptable?

[Christian Stimming]

Am Mittwoch, 22. Oktober 2008 03:58 schrieb zhangweiwu at realss.com:
> Hello. I found poEdit changes .po file unnecessarily.
>
>    1. it joins messages that spans several lines into one long line (vim
>       user probably would not like this)
>    2. it splits path references into separate lines. e.g.  '#: ../file1
>       ../file2' would be spitted to 2 lines
>
> There are probably other changes. Looks not really harmful but probably
> less readable to those who use a text editor. 

The problem is not so much another editor (e.g. vim), but rather the 
compatibility with the automatic changes that are done by gettext's msgmerge 
tool. Every translation is run through msgmerge every now and then to merge 
the latest source code changes into the translation. The output of msgmerge 
will look like what the file looks like currently, but not what poedit does 
with it.

Hence, even though poedit sticks to the syntax, it doesn't stick to the 
(stricter) convention of msgmerge, which will cause all sorts of unnecessary 
conflicts when a merge po file conflicts with a poedit edited one.

> Take a look at the 
> attached example diff files (don't apply it as patch because it's not
> against svn version) if it is acceptable.
>
> My girlfriend (had worked as an accountant) took the task of translation
> but she always prefer not to use a text editor.

I totally agree your friend should have the opportunity to use a graphical 
editor program. However, is KBabel really not an option? It would treat the 
file format in a better way. If it isn't an option, well, then poedit would 
be okay, but I'd prefer to use something else.

Regards,

Christian