live-manual, Japanese translation
Hi,
Victory has started translating live-manual into Japanese, which is
great news. He already posted one of the initial translated files for
testing purposes and after running several tests (in wheezy, jessie
and sid) most formats build correctly. But there are a couple of
things to be taken into consideration.
In respect to the generated formats, i.e, epub, pdf, odf, txt and
html, they all build fine except for the pdf one. The pdf documents
are generated but not all the text can be properly read, only some
parts of it. This is not a big deal at all, the pdf generation can be
skipped for Japanese or else simply leave things as they are (since
there will be several other formats available).
Second issue. It seems that Japanese's language code "ja" (ISO 639-1)
or even "jpn" (ISO 639-2) is not yet added to sisu's source because
Japanese was not in the list of supported languages. According to
Ralph Amissah, sisu's author, the codes for Japanese and several other
languages will soon be added. This will fix the issue.
(Thank you very much Ralph, you are always there to help. I really
appreciate that.)
Now I have to explain what the problem is with the "ja" language code
for you to understand what the problem is:
The regular procedure to add a new language to live-manual is adding
the translated .po files in their own directory named after the
language code. Then, sisu processes the files inside the manual
directory (with the same name). Since the language code for Japanese
is not supported yet, sisu falls back to the default English composite
document. In wheezy the Japanese files end up with the "en" (English)
language suffix. In jessie and sid they end up in a complete different
location without any language suffix at all.
The way I see it, there are several possible solutions:
1. Temporarily use a different language code other than "ja". This
would be a little bit ugly but it is by far the easiest way to do it
in the short term. Simply renaming "ja" into "la" fixes the problem.
As an example, using "ja" breaks the process because after the
creation of the html files the build is stopped with an error because
the files are not found in the expected location to apply one of the
post-generation scripts (fix-sisu-html.rb)
2. Modify the build target in the makefile to rename the generated
files. I think this option is too much overhead considering there are
other easier options. It is necessary to move the files from one
directory into another and rename them. Moving and renaming files is a
trivial, day to day routine, so far so good, the problem is that
different versions of the software place files in different locations
due to the fallback. So there should be a makefile for wheezy, and a
completely different one for jessie and perhaps for sid (I can't
recall off the top of my head if the version in jessie and sid place
the files in the same or in a different directory, sorry about my bad
memory).
3. Wait until the fix reaches "testing" and ask Daniel to please
upgrade sisu's version in the build system to testing. I guess he will
gladly do it, so no problem. I think this is the best option of them
all. Victory said that he would first send the three initial
translated files to the Japanese translation list for review and that
this would take more or less ten days. If in that period of time there
is a new sisu release including support for the new languages and it
makes it into testing then it would be close to perfection.
I'm just talking here from a theoretical point of view. It is
completely out of my reach to make any of those things happen. I'm
just thinking out loud :)
So in short: There is a new language (Japanese translation) in the
works to be added to live-manual. Japanese breaks the build mainly
because the language codes for Japanese are not supported. But
luckily, there are several workarounds. Any thoughts?
Have a nice weekend.
--
chals
www.chalsattack.com
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