Hi,
On Fri, Apr 21, 2006 at 06:45:36PM +0200, Bill Allombert wrote:
>
> I am supposed to use po4a for handling Debian menu manpages.
> To help with this process, I tried to normalize the original
> English manpage. However I am not completly happy with the
> result:
>
> I use po4a-normalize -f man
>
> 1) po4a-normalize replace - by \- even then this does not seem
> warranted.
>
> 2) po4a-normalize end every lines by a space.
>
> 3) po4a-normalize sometimes reformat paragraph in a less than optimal
> ways.
>
> 1. and 2. are problematic when reviewing what changes po4a-normalize did,
> though 2. can be mitigated by using diff -ub. 3. cause generated manpages
> to not be acceptable as master version.
We usually think about generated man page as binary objects (not to be
touched), not as source. The source of the generated man page is:
* the original man page (for the structure)
* the PO (for the translated content)
We regularly run a testsuite to check diff between original man pages and
their po4a-normalized version. To do this we format both pages and compare
the formated output.
Regarding the differences:
1) This is usually doing more good than bad. Translators can force using
an hyphen is really needed by using the roff \(hy character.
For example, in the update-menus page, the minus sign of update-menus
should be escaped because it must be displayed as a minus sign, not as
an hyphen. If this is not done, searches and cut&paste are painful in
an UTF-8 environment.
In the update-menus page, some hyphens are right (e.g. "text-only"),
but most of the others are wrong (options, program names). Minus signs
instead of hyphens are usually a smaller issue than the reverse.
This change causes minor differences in the formated page because
hyphens are hyphenated (the word is split in two parts when it happens
at the end of a line), while this does not happens with minus signs
(\-).
In some cases, a - should not be replaced by a \-. But po4a takes care
about this.
2) I think the additional ending space can in some cases introduce an
additional space in the formated man page (but I've not been able to
make a test case for this).
Maybe in other formats this could be an issue, but not with groff
formatters.
3) This last point is true. po4a-normalize should not be used to
normalize a man page and use it later as the source.
I don't know if it is idempotent.
Its output is not as beautiful as a man page writen by a human being,
but this is not a goal for po4a.
So I think this is not a bug.
If you want to see the differences introduced by po4a, you should display
both pages in two terminals. You will find only a few differences (in the
spacing between words and in the hyphenation of words with hyphens), which
I think are minor.
Unless there is significant difference in the generated man pages, I intend
to close this bug.
Kind Regards,
--
Nekral
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