[help-texinfo] Some other bugs related to accents too

[Nicolas Maufrais]

Hello,

Thanks to your (Karl) help, we were able to generate a manual for
Cinelerra in another language than English. People already started
working on other translations (Italian and Brazilian Portuguese). Here's
the result:
http://cvs.cinelerra.org/docs.php
Unfortunately, I discovered other new bugs, all of them being related to
accented characters, and therefore languages other than English.

Problem #1:
===========
We plan to create a contextual help in Cinelerra. When a button is
pressed in Cinelerra, yelp or another contextual help browser will be
launched, and the right section of the manual will be shown. To do that,
we convert the texinfo manual to XML, using this syntax:
/usr/local/bin/makeinfo_cvs --docbook --no-number-sections --no-warn
cinelerra_cv_manual_${language}.texi
We use the CVS version of makeinfo, as suggested by Karl, because it
contains bug fixes regarding the xml output.
We had to solve a problem. How to get yelp to show the right manual
section?  There will be several help buttons in Cinelerra, each one
pointing to a different place in the manual. One can point to a section
in yelp by specifying the node name. So, we looked at that possibility.
Even if Cinelerra is launched in English, French or another language,
each button will point to the same section in the manual. But the nodes
names change depending of the language. We therefore have to create an
abstraction layer. Here's what we decided to do:
- add comments in each texinfo file, on a line above the node name.
  Example:
  In the English manual:
    @c cincvdoc_node_number_17
    @node Debian prerequisites
  In the French manual:
    @c cincvdoc_node_number_17
    @node Prérequis pour Debian
- then, using a shell script, we parse each texinfo manual, and create a
  file which contains this:
    Node 17
    en: Debian_prerequisites
    fr: Prérequis_pour_Debian
    Node 18
    en: ...
    fr: ...
    Spaces are replaced by underscores in the XML file but that's not a
    problem.
- in Cinelerra, when someone needs information about the Debian
  prerequisites, the "abstraction file" is parsed, and yelp is asked to
  open the section "Debian_prerequisites" if Cinelerra is launched in
  English, and "Prérequis_pour_Debian" if Cinelerra is launched in
  French.
We then discovered there's a problem with the nodes names in the French
XML file. Here is what's in the French XML file:
<sect1 label="" id="Pr-requis-pour-Debian">
The accented characters are replaced by "-". It should have been:
<sect1 label="" id="Prérequis-pour-Debian">
Therefore, due to that problem, we can't correlate the node names and
the id in the XML file. And we can't use set up a contextual help in
Cinelerra when it's ran in a language which contains accented
characters.
Video editing is a complex task, and there is a lot of features which
one can't understand well without reading the documentation. Being able
to quickly get information about a particular subject just by clicking
on a button would greatly benefit users.

Problem #2
==========
Accents do not appear in the navigation panel of the French PDF manual,
when opened in Acrobat Reader. That problem isn't very important
however, since only the accents do not appear. A "é" (e with acute
accent) is shown as a normal "e" (without any accent).

I put a small test case showing those problems there: (78kb)
http://www.europephoto.com/temp/test_case.tgz
You have to change the path to the cvs version of makeinfo in
run_test.sh.

Thank you very much.
Nicolas Maufrais.

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~ BOYCOTT SUSE & NOVELL (C)(TM)(R) MICRO$OFT ~
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