Re: [Texmacs-dev] TeXmacs translations

[Joris van der Hoeven]

On Sat, 30 Jun 1934, David Allouche wrote:

> 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.

We already have this more or less thanks to Andrey Grozin,
but I still need to do some additional work. Also, I would like
to use something slightly more elaborate than .po in the future
(based on trees), which will neverless be downward compatible with .po.
However, I did not have time yet...

> 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 fact we have a more flexible approach and what you suggest can
already be done very easily in TeXmacs. It suffices that I replace
the menu, submenu, ... macros by a menu function with an arbitrary
number of arguments, which does the necessary translations on the fly
(based on the current dictionaries). I actually think that I will
implement this in the near future (please remind me!).
Of course, this prohibits the direct editing of the arguments
of the function, but all translations will be automatic and
automatically updated as a function of changes in the dictionaries.

As to Docbook: I have indeed been waiting for someone to write
an appropriate converter, but nobody has shown up yet.
Anyway, as soon as the XML data format will be fully supported,
it will be much easier to write such tools.
I prefer to start with a full Html and browser support;
this should have a more direct impact for TeXmacs documenters.

I'm also still interested in any comments about the tmdoc format.
We might certainly learn some things from the Docbook format.
Nevertheless, I think that we already provide a bit more structure
on certain issues. For instance, tmdoc comes on top of the generic
TeXmacs format, so we may include mathematical formulas in a natural way.
As to the documentation, I just wrote some specific keyboard macros like
"kbd-math" or "mbd-table", which factor a common prefix for keyboard
bindings. If for some reasons, certain modes need other prefixes,
this will allow to update the documentation by one single
change in the style file.

> 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).

I have been searching for such things.
What kind of free software do we have for this?
Is there something like an ispell/aspell program for this?
It should not be hard to interface TeXmacs with this.