po4a 0.23 review

po4a comes for po for anything and it's goal is to ease translations (and more interestingly, the maintenance of translations) using

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Jordi Vilalta

0

po4a comes for po for anything and it's goal is to ease translations (and more interestingly, the maintenance of translations) using gettext tools on areas where they were not expected like documentation.

Currently, this approach has been successfully implemented to several kinds of text formatting formats:

nroff

The good old manual pages' format, used by so much programs out there. The po4a support is very welcome here since this format is somehow difficult to use and not really friendly to the newbies.

pod

This is the Perl Online Documentation format. The language and extensions themselves are documented that way, as well as most of the existing Perl scripts. It makes easy to keep the documentation close to the actual code by embedding them both in the same file. It makes programmer life easier, but unfortunately, not the translator one.

sgml

Even if somehow superseded by XML nowadays, this format is still used rather often for documents which are more than a few screens long. It allows you to make complete books. Updating the translation of so long documents can reveal to be a real nightmare. diff reveals often useless when the original text was re-indented after update. Fortunately, po4a can help you in that process.

Currently, only the debiandoc and docbook DTD are supported, but adding support to a new one is really easy. It is even possible to use po4a on an unknown sgml dtd without changing the code by providing the needed information on the command line. See Locale::Po4a::Sgml(3pm) for details.

others

Po4a can also handle some more rare or specialized formats, such as the documentation of compilation options for the 2.4.x kernels or the diagrams produced by the dia tool. Adding a new one is often very easy and the main task is to come up with a parser of your target format. See Locale::Po4a::TransTractor(3pm) for more information about this.

What's New in This Release:
This relase eases the automation of po4a in package makefiles (check the new options), has a lot of work in the SGML and XML (Docbook) modules (now works with all SGML manuals of the Debian Documentation Project), a new Text module, and new Polish translation.