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Re: DAVENPORT: Maintaing documents for multiple languages


Bruno Cornec <Bruno.Cornec@medasys-digital-systems.fr> writes:

> C'est ainsi que Berthold Hoellmann (hoel@germanlloyd.org) s'exprimait:
> ] I´m writing some InHouse documentation using the DocBook DTD and the
> ] Modular DSSSL DocBook Stylesheets. This document should be published in
> ] german and english. I´m new to DocBook and don´t know too much SGML now,
> ] but I thought it must be possible to keep the text in one source file,
[...]

> I'm new also to this list and solved recently the same problem.
> I used in the wml package the preprocessor wml_p9_slice as follow :

Ew!

> wml_p9_slice -o ENuUNDEF:HP-HOWTO-EN.sgml -o FRuUNDEF:HP-HOWTO-FR.sgml HP-HOWTO.sgml
[...]
> <title>HP HOWTO</title>
> <subtitle>
> [FR:
> Guide d'utilisation et de configuration des produits HP sous Linux
> :FR]
> [EN:
> Utilisation and Configuration Guide of HP products under Linux
> :EN]
> </subtitle>        

I once put forth that the right way to do this was through SGML marked
sections, which basically is the SGML way to do the same thing:

<![ %FR [
Guide d'utilisation et de configuration des produits HP sous Linux
]]>
<![ %EN [
Utilisation and Configuration Guide of HP products under Linux
]]>

I have indeed used this sort of technique before.  However, Norm
argued quite compellingly that generally, this sort of thing should be
done on the style level.  It really wouldn't be too hard to filter
language-dependent elements on the LANG attribute, e.g.:

<subtitle lang="fr">
Guide d'utilisation et de configuration des produits HP sous Linux
</subtitle>
<subtitle lang="en">
Guide d'utilisation et de configuration des produits HP sous Linux
</subtitle>

The main benefit of this is that you have a more readable system,
which can be properly parsed and edited by any SGML tool.  Moreover,
it reduces configuration managment problems (i.e., ensuring slice is
installed, etc).

> BTW, may I use that list to ask some questions on the DTD DocBook
> and the sgmltools. If these questions are not adequate here, please
> forgive me and give me the right places to find more documentations
> or the right people :-)

SGMLtools has it's own list, see the sgmltools website.

> I would like to know how to change the generation code of some post-
> processor : eg my problems are to justify paragraphs in PS or TXT (not in 
> HTML of course), to control size and position of images in documents, 
> to force a page break in case of PS docs, or to generate bold text.

You should do this in the stylesheets, i.e., %default-quadding% .
Read the docbook-stylesheets documentation.

> I hava also problems with URLs. They are correct in the HTML. But they
> don't appear at all in the PS (I would like at least a note at the end of the
> page or something like lynx does when it dumps a page).

The best solution here is to go with PDF.  The Jade TeX backend and
JadeTeX support links in PDF.

-- 
--
.....Adam Di Carlo....adam@onShore.com.....<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>


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