Browsing Chinese (Simplified) translation

56.

Po4a can also handle some more rare or specialized formats, such as the documentation of compilation options for the 2.4.x kernels or the diagrams produced by the dia tool. Adding a new one is often very easy and the main task is to come up with a parser of your target format. See L<Locale::Po4a::TransTractor(3pm)> for more information about this.

57.

Unsupported formats

58.

Unfortunately, po4a still lacks support for several documentation formats.

59.

There is a whole bunch of other formats we would like to support in po4a, and not only documentation ones. Indeed, we aim at plugging all "market holes" left by the classical gettext tools. It encompass package descriptions (deb and rpm), package installation scripts questions, package changelogs, and all specialized file formats used by the programs such as game scenarios or wine resource files.

60.

How to use po4a?

61.

Graphical overview

62.

The following schema gives an overview of the process of translating documentation using po4a. Do not be afraid by its apparent complexity, it comes from the fact that the I<whole> process is represented here. Once you converted your project to po4a, only the right part of the graphic is relevant.

63.

Note that "master.doc" is taken as an example for the documentation to be translated and "translation.doc" is the corresponding translated text. The suffix could be ".pod", ".xml", or ".sgml" depending on its format. Each part of the picture will be detailed in the next sections.

64.

master.doc
|
V
+<-----<----+<-----<-----<--------+------->-------->-------+
: | | :
{translation} | { update of master.doc } :
: | | :
XX.doc | V V
(optional) | master.doc ->-------->------>+
: | (new) |
V V | |
[po4a-gettextize] doc.XX.po--->+ | |
| (old) | | |
| ^ V V |
| | [po4a-updatepo] |
V | | V
translation.pot ^ V |
| | doc.XX.po |
| | (fuzzy) |
{ translation } | | |
| ^ V V
| | {manual editing} |
| | | |
V | V V
doc.XX.po --->---->+<---<---- doc.XX.po addendum master.doc
(initial) (up-to-date) (optional) (up-to-date)
: | | |
: V | |
+----->----->----->------> + | |
| | |
V V V
+------>-----+------<------+
|
V
[po4a-translate]
|
V
XX.doc
(up-to-date)

65.

On the left part, the conversion of a translation not using po4a to this system is shown. On the top of the right part, the action of the original author is depicted (updating the documentation). The middle of the right part is where the automatic actions of po4a are depicted. The new material are extracted, and compared against the exiting translation. Parts which didn't change are found, and previous translation is used. Parts which where partially modified are also connected to the previous translation, but with a specific marker indicating that the translation must be updated. The bottom of the figure shows how a formatted document is built.