[Po4a-devel] IUF Rulebook translation

[Felix Dietze]

Dear po4a team,

I'd like to renew the workflow of the rulebook of the international
unicycling federation. It's a big document (~100 pages) with competition
rules for unicycling. It is constantly changing, because the sport is very
young and developed a lot. Sadly there is no space for experimental rules
that need to be tested first.

Right now it is written in MSWord, passed around by email and the
translations are not coordinated very well. This worked out for the last 10
years, but I think today we can do much better.

How I think it should work:
- Many people should be able to write differnt parts of the document at the
same time
- People need to know what changed at which time, so we need version control
- There should be versions with experimental rulesets for testing
competitions
  - If an experimental rule works out, it can be merged into the master
document
- The translation should be done collaboratively by the community
- people should be able to view the current versions (including
translations) online and/or print them
- If a change to a master/experimental document is made, the translation
system is automatically updated, so that the community can start to
translate changes immediately. (No regular admin interaction)

Here are my ideas so far:
- Rewrite the whole thing in LaTeX (can render to HTML or PDF)
- Put it in a git repository and manage experimental versions as branches
- With every commit render the pdf and html versions.
- Translate it (and also the experimental branches) collaboratively with
po4a and Pootle and also render the translated documents automatically

I think this could solve the issue. But before we start to work I want to
know if this is the right approach. Latex and git are no problem. But for
the translation I'm not sure.

With a new commit in git, we could trigger a po4a-updatepo for the changed
latex files in every branch. But is it possible to automatically reinject
them into Pootle? How do the translations flow back from Pootle to the
build system. If a new language is set up in Pootle, how does it create new
documents? Can we do version control for the languages to be able to jump
back to an older version of a document with proper translation?

I guess you can answer these questions easily and support us to set this up
properly.


Thanks in advance and greetings from Germany

Felix Dietze
International Unicycling Federation
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