LOCALE::PO4A::SGML.3PM(1)

NAME
Locale::Po4a::Sgml - convert SGML documents from/to PO files

DESCRIPTION
The po4a (PO for anything) project goal is to ease translations (and more interestingly, the maintenance of translations) using gettext tools on areas where they were not expected like documentation.

Locale::Po4a::Sgml is a module to help the translation of documentation in the SGML format into other [human] languages.

This module uses onsgmls(1) to parse the SGML files. Make sure it is installed. Also make sure that the DTD of the SGML files are installed in the system.

OPTIONS ACCEPTED BY THIS MODULE

debug
    Space-separated list of keywords indicating which category of extra debug messages should be shown. Possible values are: "entities", "generic", "onsgml", "refs" and "tag".

verbose
    Give more information about what's going on.

translate
    Space-separated list of extra tags (beside the DTD provided ones) whose content should form an extra msgid, i.e that should be translated.

section
    Space-separated list of extra tags (beside the DTD provided ones) containing other tags, some of them being of category translate.

indent
    Space-separated list of tags which increase the indentation level. This will affect the identation in the resulting document.

verbatim
    The layout within those tags should not be changed. The paragraph won't get wrapped, and no extra indentation space or new line will be added for cosmetic purpose.

empty
    Tags not needing to be closed.

ignore
    Tags ignored and considered as plain char data by po4a. That is to say that they can be part of an msgid. For example, <b> is a good candidate for this category since putting it in the translate section would create a msgids with only its content, (and it's ususally not a whole sentence), which is bad.

attributes
    A space-separated list of attributes that need to be translated. You can specify the attributes by their name (for example, "lang"), but you can also prefix it with a tag hierarchy, to specify that this attribute will only be translated when it is into the specified tag. For example: "<bbb><aaa>lang" specifies that the lang attribute will only be translated if it is in an "<aaa>" tag, which is in a "<bbb>" tag. The tag names are actually regular expressions so you can also write things like "<aaa|bbb>lang" to only translate "lang" attributes that are in an "<aaa>" or a "<bbb>" tag.

qualify
    A space-separated list of attributes for which the translation must be qualified by the attribute name, i.e. the text extracted for the transalation will include both the attributes name and it's value. e.g. for a tag like "<aaa lang_en="foo">" translators will be presented with the string "lang_en="foo"". Note that this also automatically adds the given attribute into the attributes list too.

force
    Proceed even if the DTD is unknown or if onsgmls finds errors in the input file.

include-all
    By default, msgids containing only one entity (like "&version;") are skipped for the translators' comfort. Activating this option prevents this optimisation. It can be useful if the document contains a construction like "<title>&Aacute;</title>", even if I doubt such things to ever happen...

ignore-inclusion
    Space-separated list of entities that won't be inlined. Use this option with caution: it may cause onsgmls (used internally) to add tags and render the output document invalid.

STATUS OF THIS MODULE
The result is perfect. I.e., the generated documents are exactly the same as the originals. But there are still some problems:

•   The error output of onsgmls is redirected to /dev/null by default, which is clearly bad. I don't know how to avoid that.

    The problem is that I have to "protect" the conditional inclusions (i.e. the "<! [ %foo [" and "]]>" stuff) from onsgmls. Otherwise onsgmls eats them, and I don't know how to restore them in the final document. To prevent that, I rewrite them to "{PO4A-beg-foo}" and "{PO4A-end}".

    The problem with this is that the "{PO4A-end}" and such I add are invalid in the document (not in a <p> tag or so).

    If you want to view the onsgmls output, just add the following to your command line (or po4a configuration line):

      -o debug=onsgmls

•   It does work only with the DebianDoc and DocBook DTD. Adding support for a new DTD should be very easy. The mechanism is the same for every DTD, you just have to give a list of the existing tags and some of their characteristics.

    I agree, this needs some more documentation, but it is still considered as beta, and I hate to document stuff which may/will change.

•   Warning, support for DTDs is quite experimental. I did not read any reference manual to find the definition of every tag. I did add tag definition to the module 'till it works for some documents I found on the net. If your document use more tags than mine, it won't work. But as I said above, fixing that should be quite easy.

    I did test DocBook against the SAG (System Administrator Guide) only, but this document is quite big, and should use most of the DocBook specificities.

    For DebianDoc, I tested some of the manuals from the DDP, but not all yet.

•   In case of file inclusion, string reference of messages in PO files (i.e. lines like "#: en/titletoc.sgml:9460") will be wrong.

    This is because I preprocess the file to protect the conditional inclusion (i.e. the "<! [ %foo [" and "]]>" stuff) and some entities (like "&version;") from onsgmls because I want them verbatim to the generated document. For that, I make a temp copy of the input file and do all the changes I want to this before passing it to onsgmls for parsing.

    So that it works, I replace the entities asking for a file inclusion by the content of the given file (so that I can protect what needs to be in a subfile also). But nothing is done so far to correct the references (i.e., filename and line number) afterward. I'm not sure what the best thing to do is.

AUTHORS
This module is an adapted version of sgmlspl (SGML postprocessor for the ONSGMLS parser) which was:

 Copyright © 1995 David Megginson <dmeggins@aix1.uottawa.ca>

The adaptation for po4a was done by:

 Denis Barbier <barbier@linuxfr.org>
 Martin Quinson (mquinson#debian.org)

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
 Copyright © 1995 David Megginson <dmeggins@aix1.uottawa.ca>.
 Copyright © 2002-2005 SPI, Inc.

This program is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of GPL v2.0 or later (see the COPYING file).