Bug#545059: apt: Typos found while translating manpages

[Nicolas François <nicolas.francois@centraliens.net>]

Hi,

On Tue, Sep 08, 2009 at 02:10:12PM +0200, David Kalnischkies wrote:
> 
> > (and double space....there are many of these)
> Very strange. They are not in the original man page -
> only in the po4a generated pot and po files.
> The spaces seems to be triggered by the line breaks and
> the intend used in the xml-files. If i write the complete
> paragraph in one line the double spaces are gone.
> (it is not bind to spaces for intend - it also happens if tabs are used)

At the end of a sentence, there are 2 conventions in English, one is to
use a double space after the period, and the other one is to use a single
space.

po4a needs to normalize paragraphs so that different paragraphs can have
the same translation. For example:
  this paragraph
  is an example.
and:
  this paragraph is an
  example.

When there are different sentences in a paragraph, po4a also normalize the
paragraph and changes '. ' to '.  '.
(I used the same convention as groff, which adds the double space
only if the period appeared at the end of a line)

Translators can ignore these double spaces and apply the convention of
their languages (however, when an existing translation is converted to a
PO using po4a-gettextize, the po4a convention is applied to both English
and translated strings).

I don't really know if my choice was fortunate or not, but it would be
quite painful for existing translations to change the convention used by
po4a (IMHO, at least the convention for parenthesis looks weird; i.e. 2
spaces are also added after closing parenthesis, which is also done by
groff).
An option could be added to change the convention, but I'm not sure this
would be very useful (only less disturbing for translators).

Best Regards,
-- 
Nekral