Hi!
Since recently there is some interest and activity
in Maxima translation to other languages I'd like to
lay down for discussion a plan for Maxima translation
project.
First question - what can be done?
A lists of things which desire translation for each
language isn't too long:
1. Maxima manual page
2. Xmaxima and omplotdata
2.1. Program interface
2.2. Small xmaxima introductory .html documentation
2.3. Maxima reference manual in .html format for built-in
xmaxima browser
3. Maxima texinfo documentation and its derivatives
3.1. Maxima .info documentation
3.2. Maxima .html documentation (2.3 above)
Second problem - how to incorporate translations
into Maxima distribution and installed Maxima
system?
1. Maxima man page - this is easy since man has
standard mechanism for localized pages. If default
English man pages go into /usr/share/man/man1 etc then
translation goes into /usr/share/man//man1 ...
Man command chooses translation according to user locale
language setting or shows default page if translation
isn't available. Recent versions of man is smart enough
to do automatic encoding translation so all pages can
be kept in Unicode.
2.1. Xmaxima and omplotdata interfaces now use msgcat
which also automatically applies translation according
to user locale. It just need two .msg
files for each language.
2.2. Xmaxima intro.html page. At present xmaxima just
contains a fixed link to ../xmaxima/intro.html.
We can modify it to look at ../xmaxima//intro.html
according to user locale. There is just one more
trouble - xmaxima built-in html browser know nothing
about encodings so for languages burdened by several
encodings we have to create separate intro.html file
for each.
Notice that items 1, 2.1, 2.2 are rather small:
man page - 10Kb, xmaxima interface - 30-40Kb,
xmaxima introductory documentation - 10Kb.
So I personally don't see any trouble if standard
"configure/make/make install" automatically install
these items for all available languages. On the other
hand we can make special configure option
for each language/encoding.
3.1. Maxima info documentation can be used in two ways
a) as system .info documentation for browsing with info/pinfo
commands.
b) as on line documentation browsable via describe command.
I really don't know what to do about a). As far as I know
info doesn't have any smart method for localized documentation.
Maybe I'm wrong but the point is that I mostly care about b).
And here we can install each translation into
../info/.
directory and make describe locale aware.
3.2. Maxima .html documentation is used by xmaxima and
we can deal with it as with intro.html in 2.2.
Maxima reference manual is quite voluminous. So for
3.1 and 3.2 it is desirable to have configure option
which enables each language/encoding.
Best wishes,
Vadim
--
Vadim V. Zhytnikov