[Texmacs-dev] TeXmacs translations

[David Allouche]

On Saturday 13 July 2002 19:27, Joris van der Hoeven wrote:
> The online TeXmacs manual has been completely restructured.
> It should be pritty safe now to start translating the manual
> into other languages. Of course, the tmdoc style is still unstable,
> so there may be some upcoming new markup in order to deal with
> hyperlinks, indexes and so. Also, I want to reorganize
> the keyboard shortcuts later this month, so you should not
> put too much effort in translating pages which are mainly
> dedicated to keyboard shortcuts.

In the LSM last week I saw a demonstration of KBabel, the tool used by
KDE folk- for creating and mantaining the translation of their
programs. I was very impressed by how it makes it very easy to keep
up-to-date and quality translations of both the user interface and the
documentation.

The user interface translation part is of course based on gettext .po
files, so using it with TeXmacs would require writing a conversion
tools for the TeXmacs dic files to/from .po. I believe that should not
be too difficult.

The documentation translation works on DocBook documents and break
them is fragments which are then processed using the same .po based
tools as the user interface. That approach makes it very easy to
update translations when only small parts of the user manual has
changed.

Using these features would be a bit more problematic. One way would be
to tweak KBabel to work with TeXmacs file format (which would be
ad-hoc and probably risky) or to creates tools for translation between
tmdoc and DocBook. This latter solution seems a better investment but
may push us to reconsider the tmdoc format. 

In addition, KBabel uses features of KOffice to provide an impressive
pseudo-grammatical spell-checking ability (though it only supports
English and French at the moment).

-- 

                                  -- David --