Re: spanish/portuguese translations and texinfo tools

Hello,

I've been trying (again) to format the Portuguese and Spanish translations
of the Maxima reference manual.
A lot of effort has been put into the translations. Many thanks to
Jorge Barros de Abreu, Juan Pablo Romero, and Mario Rodriguez.
Thanks also to Karl Berry for his generous advice about texinfo.

In summary, .info and .html output is successful, and .pdf output
is troublesome. I would greatly appreciate any advice about texi2dvi.

An update about how to get stuff to work. As ever there is probably
more than one way to do this. 

(1) In main maxima_$LANG.texi file, put @documentencoding ISO-8859-15
just after @setfilename  maxima_$LANG.info .
(2) In @defvr and @deffn, enclose words with diacritical marks in { }.
E.g., @defvr declaraci@'on  -->  @defvr {declaraci@'on}.
(3) Run makeinfo with the --enable-encoding option.
(4) If @,{c} (cedilha) appears in @node or @section, 
put @set cedilha @,{c} in maxima_$LANG.texi and
write @value{cedilha} in the @node.
E.g., @node Equa@value{cedilha}@~oes

In maxima/doc/info/pt/, I find the following command lines yield
the .info and .html files entirely successfully, and also the .pdf file
but with a lot of complaints from either tex or texi2dvi (not sure which one).
The maxima_pt.pdf looks OK.

  makeinfo --enable-encoding maxima_pt.texi
  texi2html  --lang=pt  --split=chapter  --output=tmp-html 
--css-include=../manual.css  maxima_pt.texi
  texi2dvi --pdf --batch --enable-encoding --lang=pt   maxima_pt.texi

Others should be able to execute "cvs update" in maxima/doc/info/pt/
and get the same results (assuming the same software versions).

In maxima/doc/info/es/, I find the corresponding commands

  makeinfo --enable-encoding maxima.es.texi
  texi2html --lang=es --split=chapter --output=tmp-html
--css-include=../manual.css maxima.es.texi
  texi2dvi --pdf --batch --enable-encoding --lang=es maxima.es.texi

are entirely successful for .info and .html, and produces a .pdf file,
but texi2dvi eventually stops with the message "That makes 100 errors; 
please try again". 

Software versions: 
makeinfo and texi2dvi both from texinfo-4.8 (rpm from Red Hat).
texi2html is texi2html 1.76 from http://texi2html.cvshome.org .

I have posted html output for English, Portuguese, and Spanish:
http://maxima.sf.net/docs/original/maxima_toc.html
http://maxima.sf.net/docs/original/pt/maxima_pt_toc.html
http://maxima.sf.net/docs/original/es/maxima.es_toc.html

Also the pdf output, such as it is:
http://maxima.sf.net/docs/original/maxima.pdf
http://maxima.sf.net/docs/original/pt/maxima_pt.pdf
http://maxima.sf.net/docs/original/es/maxima.es.pdf

Many thanks to the translators for their all their hard work.

Robert Dodier