[Po4a-devel] Help with po4a on Ruby Document format

Hello! First off, thanks for developing po4a, which looks like a very useful tool for i18n of non-programmatic works! I am the current maintainer of apt-listbugs [1]. [1] https://packages.debian.org/sid/apt-listbugs I am trying to use po4a in order to internationalize the man page, which is written in Ruby Document format. The source for the man page (in Ruby Document format, as I said) may be seen on the public git repository [2], embedded in the program code (between =begin and =end markers). [2] https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/apt-listbugs/apt-listbugs.git/tree/bin/ap... Unfortunately, the Ruby document format [3] does not seem to be directly supported by po4a. Could you please confirm that? Maybe I should file a wishlist bug report against po4a, requesting the support for this format... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Document_format Anyway, I was hoping that the POD format [4] could be similar enough, and I tried with: $ po4a-gettextize -f pod -m apt-listbugs -p doc-apt-listbugs.pot [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_Old_Documentation I encountered a number of issues. First of all, the processing did not stop at the =end marker and I found all the program code at the end of the .pot file. I tried to work around this with: $ sed '/^=end$/q' apt-listbugs | po4a-gettextize -f pod -m - -p doc-apt-listbugs.pot but it turns out that po4a is not able to process standard input [5]. I hope this feature may be implemented soon. [5] https://bugs.debian.org/378625 Then I tried to use a temporary file: $ sed '/^=end$/q' apt-listbugs > apt-listbugs.rd $ po4a-gettextize -f pod -m apt-listbugs.rd -p doc-apt-listbugs.pot $ rm -f apt-listbugs.rd Maybe I should permanently separate out the man page source from the program code, but I like the fact that it is embedded in the script... Another issue is that I see that several text blocks are incorrectly treated as verbatim blocks, just because they are indented. The first such block is "Print usage help and exit". Once again, this is probably caused by the lack of direct support for the Ruby Document format and by the slightly different syntax of POD... I can try and see whether I can modify the man page source, so that those blocks are not indented (hoping that the generated man page does not change too much), but I am beginning to suspect that I am getting things wrong. Could you please suggest a better strategy? Please let me know. Thanks for your time and for any help you may provide. -- http://www.inventati.org/frx/ There's not a second to spare! To the laboratory! ..................................................... Francesco Poli . GnuPG key fpr == CA01 1147 9CD2 EFDF FB82 3925 3E1C 27E1 1F69 BFFE