On Mon, 2006-11-06 at 07:50 -0700, Robert Dodier wrote:
> Can someone else respond?
> An additional question which I have, to what extent is it possible to
> use non-ascii characters in texinfo files? e.g. utf-8 or accents or
> other diacriticals in iso-8859-1. TeX itself is not comfortable with
> non-ascii, but maybe makeinfo or maybe texi2html? Or maybe it is
> necessary to always write @ tags to indicate non-ascii characters.
LaTeX has a package (inputenc) that can be used to accept either
utf8 or latin1 in the input file.
But texinfo is more problematic. The method we are currently using
in the Portuguese and Spanish translations of the Maxima manual
is using only ASCII; that means that @ tags must be used for
accented characters.
The conversion into latin1 and utf8 info files is handled by the
Makefiles in doc/info. The conversion to latin1 is made by the
program makeinfo, and then the latin1 to utf8 conversion is done
using an external program (either iconv or recode).
The way Vadim has set up the Makefiles requires two subdirectories in
doc/info for the Italian translation: it and it.utf8
The translated .texi files should all go into the it directory. In the
it.utf8 directory there should be only one .texi file, maxima.texi,
which will be a copy of the maxima.texi file in the it directory,
but changing all the lines:
@include something.texi
by
@include ../it/something.texi
Two more things to keep in mind in the translated .texi files:
- expand all tabs into spaces
- all image links of the form
@image{figures/plotting1,8cm}
must be replaced by
@image{../figures/plotting1,8cm}
I hope this helps.
Welcome to the translation team Marco, and thanks for your contribution.
Cheers,
Jaime