Hi!
I want to describe state of affairs with of Maxima i18n
project. There are some problems and unfinished things
and any advice will be greatly appreciated.
Now in Maxima CVS we have two complete translations
of Maxima documentation to Portuguese and Spanish
languages. Both these languages may use two
classes of locales
1. ISO-8859-1 locales: es_XX, pt_XX (where XX is
country code ES, AR, PT, BR ... we ignore this).
This is useful for old Linux distros and works
well with all lisp implementation.
2. UTF-8 locales: es_XX.UTF-8, pt_XX.UTF-8
This is common in almost all modern Linux
distros. There are serious problems with
UTF-8 and non UTF-aware lisps such as gcl
and cmucl but clisp and sbcl are OK.
Thus we have to create four language packs --
two packs for each language. Languge pack
is the collection of info (do be read by describe)
and html files. For this purpose we have
four configure options
--enable-lang-es
--enable-lang-pt
--enable-lang-es-utf8
--enable-lang-pt-utf8
These options are independent and each of
them triggers creation of corresponding
language pack.
Now how this implemented internally.
Maxima CVS have four directories
doc/info/es
doc/info/pt
doc/info/es.utf8
doc/info/pt.utf8
First two directories contain Spanish
and Portuguese texinfo files in
ISO-8859-1 encoding. Naturally they
are used to create ISO-8859-1 language
packs. Second pair of directories
doc/info/es.utf8
doc/info/pt.utf8
are intended for UTF-8 language packs.
They are almost empty and contain only
minimal amount of files. Main documentation
is fetched from
doc/info/es
doc/info/pt
and result is recoded from ISO to UTF.
Problems:
1. es.utf8 and pt.utf8 files contain
copies of main texinfo file maxima.texi.
Thus is someone change info/es/maxima.texi
then info/es.utf8/maxima.texi must be
changed accordingly. This is inconvenient and
error prone but I don't know how to avoid
this.
2. At present .info files in .utf8 directories
get recoder into UTF-8 only on make install stage.
This must be changed -- we want UTF-8 infos
on make stage.
3. All .html is still in ISO-8859-1. Must
be fixed.
4. There are some problem with portability
of current Makefile.am reported by Robert.
5. Very serious portability problem.
Which program to use for ISO->UTF conversion?
For Linux the natural choice is iconv -- this
program is part of glibc and must be
present on all modern Linux distros.
But what about other UNIX? I don't know.
Recode? Any other ideas?
Best wishes,
Vadim
--
Vadim V. Zhytnikov
<vvzhy at mail.ru>
<vvzhy at netorn.ru>