Nicolas François <nicolas.francois(a)centraliens.net&gt; writes: I understand that the empty lines and the concatenation of comments is not very pretty (this can be even more strange when there are comments before, in the middle and after a translatable paragraph), but is it really an issue? It's nice not to have a screen of empty lines in the resulting document, but it's not fatal to have them. They can't cause a misintepretation of the document and that's the most important. Even if we still don't like them for some reason, we can always strip them with an external script afterwards. But the concatenation of comments is a real issue. It is useful to have a construct that is guaranteed not to be modified by the processing tool (po4a). In Html module, comments were such constructs. We used them in a preprocessing phase to leave marks and placeholders in the original document that have special meaning to our postprocessing tools. The workflow is (very roughly): Process an article ------------------ 1. Preprocess the original article 2. Run po4a on the preprocessed article to get localized one 3. Postprocess the localized article For instance, in the first phase we comment out some portions of the document that must not be made translatable. Here is one real example: <p> Updated: <!-- timestamp start --> $Date: 2007/06/19 00:02:58 $ <!-- timestamp end --> </p> We don't want the line with $Date to be translatable at all, since it is set automatically by CVS. This is a dynamically changing string that we don't want to leak in POT and POs. So we comment it out and after the preprocessing phase the fragment looks like this: <p> Updated: <!-- timestamp start --> <!-- $Date: 2007/06/19 00:02:58 $ --> <!-- timestamp end --> </p> After the po4a phase it looks like (for Bulgarian): <p> Последно обновяване: <!-- timestamp start --> <!-- $Date: 2007/06/19 00:02:58 $ --> <!-- timestamp end --> </p> And finally, after the postprocessing phase the fragment looks like this (for Bulgarian): <p> Последно обновяване: <!-- timestamp start --> $Date: 2007/06/19 00:02:58 $ <!-- timestamp end --> </p> This was working fine with Html module, but Xhtml's comment concatenation breaks it. I don't insist on keeping the Html's way of doing things, I can imagine that comment concatenation may be good in other cases, but it is really useful to have some construct that po4a will just pass verbatim into the output document. (The above example was picked because is the shortest one.) -- Protect your digital freedom and privacy, eliminate DRM, learn more at http://www.defectivebydesign.org/what_is_drm

Nicolas François <nicolas.francois(a)centraliens.net&gt; writes: One option could be to use another trick: <p> Updated: <timestamp date="$Date: 2007/06/19 00:02:58 $"> </p> This could be generated by the preprocessor, and the timestamp could be restored afterward by the postprocessor. Oh, looks like a viable option. Thanks for the idea! I'll try it out as soon as I can. I can try to add an option to handle comments differently. I will work on it after the 0.32 release. Such an option would be very useful improvement. Of course, there is no rush. Wish you good luck with the incoming release and thank you for your invaluable help! -- Protect your digital freedom and privacy, eliminate DRM, learn more at http://www.defectivebydesign.org/what_is_drm