kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[jp charras <jp.charras@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Le 08/08/2014 16:50, Marco Ciampa a écrit :
> Public bug reported:
> 
> In KiCad EDA there is no support for multilingual documentation tools.
> Documentation is written directly with OpenOffice, a simple Wordprocessor, that does not handle automatic multilingual / multiformat document handling like many OpenSource projects already do nowadays. See the GIMP for example.
> 
> The problem.
> Master documentation is written in OO. Suppose that some volunteer (like me) is avid to translate it into a foreign language. Suppose that starting from a specific version copy, working night and day, in a fiew months he (me) is able to complete it. It wold be already obsolete because of the improvement and new functions applied meanwhile in the master developmente branch. Documentation, if you want to be ready when the development version become stable, must be translated along with the development process.
> Suppose you want to update. You (me) have to read all the master copy along with the translated copy do see where the document is changed and how. This work is many times more the translation effort in itself. If the situation do not change this could be a very discouraging factor for translators.
> 
> The solution.
> The aforementioned GIMP translation team use xml2po to face up to this problem, another (better) tool is Publican (https://jfearn.fedorapeople.org/en-US/Publican/4.0/html/Users_Guide/index.html) but I think that there are many more different tools out there.
> 
> A transition to the XML format will have the (benign) side effect to
> enable context sensitive help, as is in GIMP, much appreciated by the
> users.
> 
> ** Affects: kicad
>      Importance: Undecided
>          Status: New
> 

Support for multilingual documentation is not an easy task.
You have to translate text, but also many screen shots and diagrams.

For new and short doc, we are now using the markdown language (plain
text with few tags).

Master documentation is an other thing.
But what do you mean by: "a *simple* Word processor"?
OpenOffice/LibreOffice (we are using LibreOffice) stores the text using
a XML format (just unzip a .odt file).

There are some specific tools to handle translations, depending on the
word processor you are using.

*You could have a look at omegat (http://www.omegat.org)*

Due to the fact OpenOffice/LibreOffice archives a document (xml files +
images) in a zipped archive, our main concerns is the fact this is a
binary file, which is poorly handled by all version control systems.

Note also: LibreOffice can store the file in a flat xml form (.fodt files)

-- 
Jean-Pierre CHARRAS