Need advice for Bug #

[Geert Janssens]

On donderdag 18 augustus 2011, Yasuaki Taniguchi/谷口康明 wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> > For starters, I presume most people interested in the Japanese
> > documentation will have some Japanese font on their PC's. I presume they
> > installed such a font for reading among others Japanese websites. Are
> > the ipa fonts common to be installed on those people's PC's (not only on
> > linux and friends but also on OS X or Windows for example) ?
> 
> IPA fonts are not included in Windows, Mac OS X, and Solaris. But if
> you're viewing
> HTML pages, problems don't happen because Japanese characters are
> rendered dynamically
> by their own fonts. The problem only happens when we use PDF and
> Postscript.
> 
> > Do I understand it correctly that the ipa fonts are used to create the
> > PDF's only ? Asked otherwise, how do the winhelp and html version of the
> > documentation display the Japanese translation ?
> 
> Yes, IPA fonts are used only when creating PDFs. Winhelp is based on HTML,
> so IPA fonts aren't used. When we open winhelp on Windows, MS mincho and
> MS gothic are used.
> 
> > In principle, I don't think our documentation svn tree should include the
> > fonts. They are generally available in most distributions.
> > 
> > Our documentation build system is autotools based. Following that concept
> > we should check for our requirements at configure time (in
> > configure.in). We could choose there to either fail to configure if the
> > font is not available on the system, or to simply disable the generation
> > of the Japanese pdf output, with an instructive warning that the font is
> > required for the Japanese pdf output.
> 
> I agree with your opinion. I'll try to modify configure.in and
> Makefile.am to check the existence of Japanese fonts.
> But I'm now translation Concepts guide chapter 16 "Python Bindings",
> so it will take some times.
> 
Hi Yasuaki,

Thank you for the extra details. I agree with you that other languages may run 
into the same problem. Until now, Japanese is the only non-latin language for 
which the documentation get translated, but more may follow in the future. All 
the more a good reason to look for a proper solution now.

So we only need the IPA font for pdf generation. Since it gets embedded in the 
pdf, people only interested in reading the pdf don't need to have the font 
installed themselves. That nicely limits the people that need to have the font 
installed.

I propose to move forward as follows:
I'd like to apply your translation work already, but skip the changes you made 
for the pdf generation. That part still needs some work based on the 
discussion so far. Applying the translations separately will already make the 
guide available in Japanese via the website and optionally in the other 
formats (winhelp, epub, mobi).

That way it will probably also be easier for you to work on these two parts 
independently, first the translation, and later improve the build system.

Cristian, you mentioned you had fixed some small xmllint errors. Perhaps you 
may want to apply your version instead.

How does that sound ?

Geert