[OPEN-ILS-DOCUMENTATION] After the webinar: flow from DocBook to Evergreen Help Texts and back

[Dan Scott]

2009/6/12 Repke de Vries <repke at xs4all.nl>:
> Hi all
>
> at some point in last Wednesday's Webinar [1] the question was
> brought up if DocBook documents could be output in such a way that it
> becomes  Evergreen Help texts. The answer was: yes, this can be done.
>
> This of-course would help consistency across external documentation
> (manuals, what have you) and Evergreen internal documentation = Help
> Texts, enormously.
>
>  From an internationalisation perspective my question is: would this
> also be possible the other way around ?
>
> We know that translation of menu structures and help texts is
> underway (like Armenian and Russian) and if we could export and feed
> back into DocBook easily, this could kick start core translated
> external documentation.

That's a whole lot trickier. A crude approach would be to rely on the
same entities defined in the DTDs for portions of the OPAC / Staff
client in the DocBook, but it would make the process of creating and
processing the DocBook more complex (I believe XInclude is the
preferred approach, entities are passé nowadays). Depending on the
context in which the entities were used, it could also cause
difficulties (for example, just adding an "s" to the end of an entity
to make it plural in the English source would not work terribly well
in many other languages).

However, loading the strings into a translation management application
like POEdit or Pootle that suggests translations based on fuzzy
matches could be useful. Something like po4a
(http://po4a.alioth.debian.org/features.php) appears to hit that use
case relatively well; one could treat the documentation as just
another set of PO strings to translate along with the interface labels
/ menus, etc. Which is a roundabout way of getting to where you were
headed, I think.

That said, I haven't touched po4a, so I don't know how trustworthy it
is in roundtripping DocBook to PO to DocBook. Also, translating the
strings out of context of the DocBook elements might introduce its own
challenges. But it's certainly worth a look.

-- 
Dan Scott
Laurentian University