[Po4a-devel]Introducing po4a

[Martin Quinson]

Hello,

that's the first time I post on perl-doc, so let me introduce myself. I'm
one of the coordinator of the french translation effort within Debian. I'm
not really translator, and mainly work on on the infrastruture allowing
translators to do their work, detecting when their work needs to get
updated, and so on.

To that extend, I came up with a tool suite called po4a (po for anything)
which helps the documentation translation. The idea is to extract the
strings to translate from the original document, put them in the po format
which translators love so much, and put the result of the translation back
into the structure of the original document. 

The advantages include:
 - makes the track of the changes in the original easy, using the classical
   gettext tools
 - make possible to get some stats about the completness of the translations
 - translators ability to mess with the original structure is reduced (even
   if not zeroed)

It is implemented in Perl and is rather modular. For now the supported
formats are:
  - pod: Perl Online Documentation format.
  - man: Good old manual page format.
  - sgml: either debiandoc or docbook DTD.
  - kernelhelp: Help messages of each kernel (2.4.x) compilation option.
  - dia: uncompressed Dia diagrams.
  
  (The sgml module provides some *very basic* support for xml documents, and
   a more complete/correct module for xml is underway in the CVS)

The tool itself is completely translated in french, spanish and catalan. Its
documentation is partially translated to spanish and french.

I write about this here on perl-doc because I saw in the archive that the
perl documentation translation effort was trying to organize. I'm in the
process of converting the existing french translation of the pod to this
system, and so far, it seems to work well. I just have "tiny" issues with
the gettext tools having trouble to deal with files of several megabytes.
There are in the process of getting addressed.

Homepage:
http://alioth.debian.org/projects/po4a/


Comments welcome,
Mt.

-- 
For every complex problem there is a solution which is simple, neat and wrong.