Re: spanish/portuguese translations and texinfo tools

Robert Dodier writes:
> Hi Vadim,
> 
> About using the usual POSIX locale mechanism, that sounds 
> great to me. I'm initially mostly interested in the info output
> as used by describe. Can you outline the changes that would
> be necessary to make describe and/or cl-info aware of locale-
> specific info files?
> 

1. Check the value of LANG or LC_MESSAGES environment variables
during Maxima initialization and set some internal variable,
say *LANGUAGE*, accordingly.  Value of LANG has the form
 or ..

2. After this describe should use
/info/./maxima.info
or standard English
/info/maxima.info
if locale-specific documentation is absent.

Basically this is all what we need for describe.

It is not quite good that Spanish and Portuguese translation files
in Maxima CVS are named as *_pt.texi, *.es.texi.
Directory names info/pt/maxima.texi and info/es/maxima.texi
(info//maxima.texi) is enough.


> On a related note here is a patch for $DESCRIBE which employs
> a variable *MAXIMA-INFO-FILENAME* instead of a hard-coded
> string (namely "maxima.info"). If you patch src/macdes.lisp and then
> :lisp (setq *maxima-info-filename* "maxima_pt.info")
> :lisp (setq cl-info::*info-paths* '(".../doc/info/pt/"))
> (where ... leading up to doc/info/pt is replaced by something suitable)
> then you can see the translated documentation for "? describe",
> "? save", etc.
> 
> At present maxima_pt.info seems to confuse cl-info --
> "? foo" seems to print everything from foo to the end of the file.
> 
> I also tried setting the filename and path to maxima.es.info and 
> .../doc/info/es/, but ? returns nothing for items that should be there
> (e.g., save, describe), and returns some confused text in other
> cases (e.g. tex). 


Probably cl-info needs some modification.  BTW, which lisp do you use?
I observe that describe (well, cl-info) behaves in different fashion for
all 4 lisps GCL, clisp, CMUCL, SBCL in the case of non-English info.
> 
> Anyway this patch might be something others would enjoy trying out.
> 


-- 
      Vadim V. Zhytnikov