Re: [Po4a-devel][RFC] Multi-lines verbatim blocks
On Mon, Nov 15, 2004 at 11:55:31PM +0100, Nicolas François wrote:
Hello,
To solve an issue with the man module, I've implemented a way to specify
some (multi-lines) verbatim blocks.
I did not understand your message at first reading because I thought
that 'verbatim blocks' were unformatted, maybe you should talk about
'untranslated blocks' instead.
I'm wondering if this functionality has an interest for po4a
users (it
may be error prone), and if it can be useful for other modules (in this
case it should be implemented in Transtractor).
SGML prologs seem to be quite similar, and almost all formats can define
header comments. So if I understand you right, it seems to be quite
generic.
The major cause (50%) of failure of the man module (po4a exits with
an
error message) concerns blocks in roff language (using .de, .if, .ie or
.el requests).
They are usually used to define new macros or different ways to do the
same thing depending on the parser (e.g. nroff or troff).
Copying these block of code from the original to the translation is
particularly useful for the man module because the roff language is quite
complicated, which pushed authors to just cut & past definitions found in
other pages (a lot of the defined macros are not even used).
Agreed.
With my first try, I could correctly process 60 additional files
(without
even defining additional macros). 25 different blocks were used (each one
defined in a file).
Everything is not so neat:
- if the block appear in the middle of a paragraph, the block will be
copied verbatim at a wrong place: at the beginning of the paragraph
(this could be fixed by adding a function to "flush" the parser).
Most of the time, it is not a concern because the macros are defined
in the header and it is up to the user to specify or not a verbatim
block, but it should probably be fixed.
IMO such blocks should split paragraphs into 3 parts: before, block
itself, after.
- it makes po4a slower (I don't think it's an issue, except
for the
testsuite;): each lines of the input document has to be compared with
a line of each specified files (and lines have to be shifted/unshifted
many times).
Do not worry, I have some ideas to optimize regexes. Do you have some
large file which could be useful for benchmarking?
- the user can do whatever he wants and it is, as the addendums, a
quite
complicated feature which can be error prone.
I do not follow you here, my understanding was that blocks were copied
from original file, so translators have almost no control here.
Do you think it may be worth having such a mechanism in po4a?
Is there an interest for the other modules?
Sounds like a very good idea, but maybe you should first explain in more
details how you want to proceed.
Note:
For the man module, I'm also planing to add a verbatim and translate
option (like in the sgml module), which should allow to specify the
behaviour of the parser for these additional macros.
Another Note:
I've not tried this, but it may solve #263298 (Please let -gettextize know
about addendums and remove them automatically).
This would be really cool, I am converting man pages of manpages-fr by hand,
and it is quite boring ;)
Denis