Maxima translation project - proposal



Hello!!!, 

First, Thanks to Vadim for interesing to 
help us in the traslation plan of Maxima. 

>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.

Yes, It is true. The Maxima manual page traslation is
very easy. The other components of Maxima doc (without 
the Maxima info documentation) haven't a problem to translate
an other languages. I think to be should can to add
the traslations in the next Maxima stable version. One 
way to start is work across of CVS Server or the mailing
list. 

>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.

I agree. I hope, in this week to send the 
firts files of spanish traslations of 
Maxima reference Manual (old version). 
  

Regards, 

Juan Pablo Romero Bernal

Best wishes,

Vadim

--     Vadim V. Zhytnikov

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