=encoding UTF-8

=head1 NAME

po4a - framework to translate documentation and other materials

=head1 Introduction

po4a (PO for anything) eases the maintenance of documentation translation using
the classical gettext tools. The main feature of po4a is that it decouples the
translation of content from its document structure.

This document serves as an introduction to the po4a project with a focus on
potential users considering whether to use this tool and on the curious wanting
to understand why things are the way they are.

=head1 Why po4a?

The philosophy of Free Software is to make the technology truly available to
everyone. But licensing is not the only consideration: untranslated free
software is useless for non-English speakers. Therefore, we still have some
work to do to make software available to everybody.

This situation is well understood by most projects and everybody is now
convinced of the necessity to translate everything. Yet, the actual
translations represent a huge effort of many individuals, crippled by small
technical difficulties.

Thankfully, Open Source software is actually very well translated using the
gettext tool suite. These tools are used to extract the strings to translate
from a program and present the strings to translate in a standardized format
(called PO files, or translation catalogs). A whole ecosystem of tools has
emerged to help the translators actually translate these PO files. The result
is then used by gettext at run time to display translated messages to the end
users.

Regarding documentation, however, the situation still somewhat disappointing.
At first translating documentation may seem to be easier than translating a
program as it would seem that you just have to copy the documentation source
file and start translating the content. However, when the original
documentation is modified, keeping track of the modifications quickly turns
into a nightmare for the translators. If done manually, this task is unpleasant
and error prone.

Outdated translations are often worse than no translation at all. End-users can
be tricked by documentation describing an old behavior of the program.
Furthermore, they cannot interact directly with the maintainers since they
don't speak English. Additionally, the maintainer cannot fix the problem as
they don't know every language in which their documentation is translated.
These difficulties, often caused by poor tooling, can undermine the motivation
of volunteer translators, further aggravating the problem.

B<The goal of the po4a project is to ease the work of documentation translators>.
In particular, it makes documentation translations I<maintainable>.

The idea is to reuse and adapt the gettext approach to this field. As with
gettext, texts are extracted from their original locations and presented to
translators as PO translation catalogs. The translators can leverage the
classical gettext tools to monitor the work to do, collaborate and organize as
teams. po4a then injects the translations directly into the documentation
structure to produce translated source files that can be processed and
distributed just like the English files. Any paragraph that is not translated
is left in English in the resulting document, ensuring that the end users never
see an outdated translation in the documentation.

This automates most of the grunt work of the translation maintenance.
Discovering the paragraphs needing an update becomes very easy, and the process
is completely automated when elements are reordered without further
modification. Specific verification can also be used to reduce the chance of
formatting errors that would result in a broken document.

Please also see the B<FAQ> below in this document for a more complete list
of the advantages and disadvantages of this approach.

=head2 Supported formats

Currently, this approach has been successfully implemented to several kinds
of text formatting formats:

=over

=cut

# TRANSLATOR: 'man' refers to manpages and should probably not be translated

=item man (mature parser)

The good old manual pages' format, used by so many programs out there. po4a
support is very welcome here since this format is somewhat difficult to use and
not really friendly to newbies.

The L<Locale::Po4a::Man(3pm)|Man> module also supports the mdoc format, used by
the BSD man pages (they are also quite common on Linux).

=item AsciiDoc (mature parser)

This format is a lightweight markup format intended to ease the authoring of
documentation. It is for example used to document the git system. Those
manpages are translated using po4a.

See L<Locale::Po4a::AsciiDoc> for details.

=item pod (mature parser)

This is the Perl Online Documentation format. The language and extensions
themselves are documented using this format in addition to most existing Perl
scripts. It makes easy to keep the documentation close to the actual code by
embedding them both in the same file. It makes programmer's life easier, but
unfortunately, not the translator's, until you use po4a.

See L<Locale::Po4a::Pod> for details.

=item sgml (mature parser)

Even if superseded by XML nowadays, this format is still used for documents
which are more than a few screens long. It can even be used for complete books.
Documents of this length can be very challenging to update. B<diff> often
reveals useless when the original text was re-indented after update.
Fortunately, po4a can help you after that process.

Currently, only DebianDoc and DocBook DTD are supported, but adding support for
a new one is really easy. It is even possible to use po4a on an unknown SGML
DTD without changing the code by providing the needed information on the
command line. See L<Locale::Po4a::Sgml(3pm)> for details.

=item TeX / LaTeX (mature parser)

The LaTeX format is a major documentation format used in the Free Software
world and for publications.

The L<Locale::Po4a::LaTeX(3pm)|LaTeX> module was tested with the Python
documentation, a book and some presentations.

=item text (mature parser)

The Text format is the base format for many formats that include long blocks of
text, including Markdown, fortunes, YAML front matter section, debian/changelog, 
and debian/control.

This supports the common format used in Static Site Generators, READMEs, and
other documentation systems. See L<Locale::Po4a::Text(3pm)|Text> for details.

=item xml and XHMTL (probably mature parser)

The XML format is a base format for many documentation formats.

Currently, the DocBook DTD (see L<Locale::Po4a::Docbook(3pm)> for details) and
XHTML are supported by po4a.

=item BibTex (probably mature parser)

The BibTex format is used alongside LaTex for formatting lists of references (bibliographies).

See L<Locale::Po4a::BibTex> for details.

=item Docbook (probably mature parser)

A XML-based markup language that uses semantic tags to describe documents.

See L<Locale::Po4a:Docbook> for greater details.

=item Guide XML (probably mature parser)

A XML documentation format. This module was developed specifically to help with supporting 
and maintaining translations of Gentoo Linux documentation up until at least March 2016 
(Based on the Wayback Machine). Gentoo have since moved to the DevBook XML format.

See L<Locale::Po4a:Guide> for greater details.

=item Wml (probably mature parser)

The Web Markup Language, do not mixup WML with the WAP stuff used on cell phones. 
This module relies on the Xhtml module, which itself relies on the XmL module.

See L<Locale::Po4a::Wml> for greater details.

=item Yaml (probably mature parser)

A strict superset of JSON. YAML is often used as systems or configuration projects. 
YAML is at the core of Red Hat's Ansible.

See L<Locale::Po4a::Yaml> for greater details.

=item RubyDoc (probably mature parser)

The Ruby Document (RD) format, originally the default documentation format for Ruby 
and Ruby projects before converted to RDoc in 2002. Though apparently the Japanese 
version of the Ruby Reference Manual still use RD.

See L<Locale::Po4a::RubyDoc> for greater details.


=item Halibut (probably experimental parser)

A documentation production system, with elements similar to TeX, debiandoc-sgml, 
TeXinfo, and others, developed by Simon Tatham, the developer of PuTTY.

See L<Locale::Po4a:Halibut> for greater details.

=item Ini (probably experimental parser)

Configuration file format popularized by MS-DOS.

See L<Locale::Po4a::Ini> for greater details.

=item texinfo (very highly experimental parser)

All of the GNU documentation is written in this format (it's even one of the
requirements to become an official GNU project). The support for
L<Locale::Po4a::Texinfo(3pm)|Texinfo> in po4a is still at the beginning.
Please report bugs and feature requests.

=item Others supported formats

Po4a can also handle some more rare or specialized formats, such as the
documentation of compilation options for the 2.4+ Linux kernels (L<Locale::Po4a::KernelHelp>) or the diagrams
produced by the dia tool (L<Locale::Po4a:Dia>). Adding a new format is often very easy and the main
task is to come up with a parser for your target format. See
L<Locale::Po4a::TransTractor(3pm)> for more information about this.

=item Unsupported formats

Unfortunately, po4a still lacks support for several documentation formats. Many
of them would be easy to support in po4a. This includes formats not just used
for documentation, such as, package descriptions (deb and rpm), package
installation scripts questions, package changelogs, and all the specialized
file formats used by programs such as game scenarios or wine resource files.

=back

=head1 Using po4a

Historically, po4a was built around four scripts, each fulfilling a specific
task. L<po4a-gettextize(1)> helps bootstrapping translations and optionally
converting existing translation projects to po4a. L<po4a-updatepo(1)> reflects
the changes to the original documentation into the corresponding po files.
L<po4a-translate(1)> builds translated source file from the original file and
the corresponding PO file. In addition, L<po4a-normalize(1)> is mostly useful to
debug the po4a parsers, as it produces an untranslated document from the
original one. It makes it easier to spot the glitches introduced by the parsing
process.

Most projects only require the features of L<po4a-updatepo(1)> and
L<po4a-translate(1)>, but these scripts proved to be cumbersome and error prone
to use. If the documentation to translate is split over several source files, it
is difficult to keep the PO files up to date and build the documentation files
correctly. As an answer, a all-in-one tool was provided: L<po4a(1)>. This tool
takes a configuration file describing the structure of the translation project:
the location of the PO files, the list of files to translate, and the options to
use, and it fully automates the process. When you invoke L<po4a(1)>, it both
updates the PO files and regenerate the translation files that need to. If
everything is already up to date, L<po4a(1)> does not change any file.

The rest of this section gives an overview of how use the scripts' interface of
po4a. Most users will probably prefer to use the all-in-one tool, that is
described in the documentation of L<po4a(1)>.

=head2 Graphical overview of the po4a scripts

The following schema gives an overview of how each po4a script can be used.
Here, F<master.doc> is an example name for the documentation to be translated;
F<XX.doc> is the same document translated in the language XX while F<doc.XX.po>
is the translation catalog for that document in the XX language. Documentation
authors will mostly be concerned with F<master.doc> (which can be a manpage, an
XML document, an asciidoc file or similar); the translators will be mostly
concerned with the PO file, while the end users will only see the F<XX.doc> file.

                                   master.doc
                                       |
                                       V
     +<-----<----+<-----<-----<--------+------->-------->-------+
     :           |                     |                        :
{translation}    |         { update of master.doc }             :
     :           |                     |                        :
   XX.doc        |                     V                        V
 (optional)      |                 master.doc ->-------->------>+
     :           |                   (new)                      |
     V           V                     |                        |
  [po4a-gettextize]   doc.XX.po -->+   |                        |
          |            (old)       |   |                        |
          |              ^         V   V                        |
          |              |     [po4a-updatepo]                  |
          V              |           |                          V
   translation.pot       ^           V                          |
          |              |        doc.XX.po                     |
          |              |         (fuzzy)                      |
   { translation }       |           |                          |
          |              ^           V                          V
          |              |     {manual editing}                 |
          |              |           |                          |
          V              |           V                          V
      doc.XX.po --->---->+<---<-- doc.XX.po    addendum     master.doc
      (initial)                 (up-to-date)  (optional)   (up-to-date)
          :                          |            |             |
          :                          V            |             |
          +----->----->----->------> +            |             |
                                     |            |             |
                                     V            V             V
                                     +------>-----+------<------+
                                                  |
                                                  V
                                           [po4a-translate]
                                                  |
                                                  V
                                                XX.doc
                                             (up-to-date)

This schema is complicated, but in practice only the right part (involving
L<po4a-updatepo(1)> and L<po4a-translate(1)>) is used once the project is setup
and configured.

The left part depicts how L<po4a-gettextize(1)> can be used to convert an
existing translation project to the po4a infrastructure. This script takes an
original document and its translated counterpart, and tries to build the
corresponding PO file. Such manual conversion is rather cumbersome (see the
L<po4a-gettextize(1)> documentation for more details), but it is only needed
once to convert your existing translations. If you don't have any translation to
convert, you can forget about this and focus on the right part of the schema.

On the top right part, the action of the original author is depicted, updating
the documentation. The middle right part depicts the automatic actions of
L<po4a-updatepo(1)>. The new material is extracted and compared against the
exiting translation. The previous translation is used for the parts that didn't
change, while partially modified parts are connected to the previous translation
with a "fuzzy" marker indicating that the translation must be updated. New or
heavily modified material is left untranslated.

Then, the I<manual editing> reported depicts the action of the translators, that
modify the PO files to provide translations to every original string and
paragraph. This can be done using either a specific editor such as the B<GNOME
Translation Editor>, KDE's B<Lokalize> or B<poedit>, or using an online
localization platform such as B<weblate> or B<pootle>. The translation result is
a set of PO files, one per language. Please refer to the gettext documentation
for more details.

The bottom part of the figure shows how L<po4a-translate(1)> creates a
translated source document from the F<master.doc> original document and the
F<doc.XX.po> translation catalog that was updated by the translators. The
structure of the document is reused, while the original content is replaced by
its translated counterpart. Optionally, an addendum can be used to add some
extra text to the translation. This is often used to add the name of the
translator to the final document. See below for details.

As noted before, the L<po4a(1)> program combines the effects of the separated
scripts, updating the PO files and the translated document in one invocation.
The underlying logic remains the same.

=head2 Starting a new translation

If you use L<po4a(1)>, there is no specific step to start a translation. You
just have to list the languages in the configuration file, and the missing PO
files are automatically created. Naturally, the translator then have to provide
translations for every content used in your documents. L<po4a(1)> also creates a
POT file, that is a PO template file. Potential translators can translate your
project into a new language by renaming this file and providing the translations
in their language.

If you prefer to use the individual scripts separately, you should use
L<po4a-gettextize(1)> as follows to create the POT file. This file can then be
copied into F<XX.po> to initiate a new translation.

  $ po4a-gettextize --format <format> --master <master.doc> --po <translation.pot>

The master document is used in input, while the POT file is the output of this process.

=head2 Integrating changes to the original document

The script to use for that is L<po4a-updatepo(1)> (please refer to its
documentation for details):

  $ po4a-updatepo --format <format> --master <new_master.doc> --po <old_doc.XX.po>

The master document is used in input, while the PO file is updated: it is used
both in input and output.

=head2 Generating a translated document

Once you're done with the translation, you want to get the translated
documentation and distribute it to users along with the original one.
For that, use the L<po4a-translate(1)> program as follows:

  $ po4a-translate --format <format> --master <master.doc> --po <doc.XX.po> --localized <XX.doc>

Both the master and PO files are used in input, while the localized file is the
output of this process.

=head2 Using addenda to add extra text to translations

Adding new text to the translation is probably the only thing that is easier in
the long run when you translate files manually :). This happens when you want
to add an extra section to the translated document, not corresponding to any
content in the original document. The classical use case is to give credits to
the translation team, and to indicate how to report translation-specific
issues.

With po4a, you have to specify B<addendum> files, that can be conceptually
viewed as patches applied to the localized document after processing. Each
addendum must be provided as a separate file, which format is however very
different from the classical patches. The first line is a I<header line>,
defining the insertion point of the addendum (with an unfortunately cryptic
syntax -- see below) while the rest of the file is added verbatim at the
determined position.

The header line must begin with the string B<PO4A-HEADER:>, followed by a
semi-colon separated list of I<key>B<=>I<value> fields.

For example, the following header declares an addendum that must be placed
at the very end of the translation.

 PO4A-HEADER: mode=eof

Things are more complex when you want to add your extra content in the middle
of the document. The following header declares an addendum that must be
placed after the XML section containing the string C<About this document> in
translation.

=cut

#TRANSLATORS: you can keep the French example here, or invert it: Use a header in your own language at the beginning, and then say that it shouldn't be in English, translating the second header example to English

=pod

 PO4A-HEADER: position=About this document; mode=after; endboundary=</section>

In practice, when trying to apply an addendum, po4a searches for the first line
matching the C<position> argument (this can be a regexp). Do not forget that
po4a considers the B<translated> document here. This documentation is in
English, but your line should probably read as follows if you intend your
addendum to apply to the French translation of the document.

 PO4A-HEADER: position=À propos de ce document; mode=after; endboundary=</section>

Once the C<position> is found in the target document, po4a searches for the next
line after the C<position> that matches the provided C<endboundary>. The
addendum is added right B<after> that line (because we provided an
I<endboundary>, i.e. a boundary ending the current section).

The exact same effect could be obtained with the following header, that is equivalent:

 PO4A-HEADER: position=About this document; mode=after; beginboundary=<section>

Here, po4a searches for the first line matching C<<section>> after the line
matching C<About this document> in the translation, and add the addendum
B<before> that line since we provided a I<beginboundary>, i.e. a boundary marking
the beginning of the next section. So this header line requires to place the
addendum after the section containing C<About this document>, and instruct po4a
that a section starts with a line containing the C<<section>> tag. This is
equivalent to the previous example because what you really want is to add this
addendum either after C</section>> or before C<<section>>.

You can also set the insertion I<mode> to the value C<before>, with a similar
semantic: combining C<mode=before> with an C<endboundary> will put the addendum
just B<after> the matched boundary, that the last potential boundary line before
the C<position>. Combining C<mode=before> with an C<beginboundary> will put the
addendum just B<before> the matched boundary, that the last potential boundary
line before the C<position>.

  Mode   | Boundary kind |     Used boundary      | Insertion point compared to the boundary
 ========|===============|========================|=========================================
 'before'| 'endboundary' | last before 'position' | Right after the selected boundary
 'before'|'beginboundary'| last before 'position' | Right before the selected boundary
 'after' | 'endboundary' | first after 'position' | Right after the selected boundary
 'after' |'beginboundary'| first after 'position' | Right before the selected boundary
 'eof'   |   (none)      |  n/a                   | End of file

=head3 Hint and tricks about addenda

=over

=item

Remember that these are regexp. For example, if you want to match the end of a
nroff section ending with the line C<.fi>, do not use C<.fi> as B<endboundary>,
because it will match with C<the[ fi]le>, which is obviously not what you
expect. The correct B<endboundary> in that case is: C<^\.fi$>.

=item

White spaces ARE important in the content of the C<position> and boundaries. So
the two following lines B<are different>. The second one will only be found if
there is enough trailing spaces in the translated document.

 PO4A-HEADER: position=About this document; mode=after; beginboundary=<section>
 PO4A-HEADER: position=About this document ; mode=after; beginboundary=<section>

=item

Although this context search may be considered to operate roughly on each line
of the B<translated> document, it actually operates on the internal data string of
the translated document. This internal data string may be a text spanning a
paragraph containing multiple lines or may be a XML tag itself alone. The
exact I<insertion point> of the addendum must be before or after the internal
data string and can not be within the internal data string.

=item

Pass the B<-vv> argument to po4a to understand how the addenda are added to the
translation. It may also help to run po4a in debug mode to see the actual
internal data string when your addendum does not apply.

=back

=head3 Addenda examples

=over 

=item

If you want to add something after the following nroff section:

  .SH "AUTHORS"

You should select a two step approach by setting B<mode=after>. Then you should
narrow down search to the line after B<AUTHORS> with the B<position> argument
regex. Then, you should match the beginning of the next section (i.e.,
B<^\.SH>) with the B<beginboundary> argument regex. That is to say:

 PO4A-HEADER:mode=after;position=AUTHORS;beginboundary=\.SH

=item

If you want to add something right after a given line (e.g. after the line
"Copyright Big Dude"), use a B<position> matching this line, B<mode=after> and
give a B<beginboundary> matching any line.

 PO4A-HEADER:mode=after;position=Copyright Big Dude, 2004;beginboundary=^

=item

If you want to add something at the end of the document, give a B<position>
matching any line of your document (but only one line. Po4a won't proceed if
it's not unique), and give an B<endboundary> matching nothing. Don't use simple
strings here like B<"EOF">, but prefer those which have less chance to be in
your document.

 PO4A-HEADER:mode=after;position=About this document;beginboundary=FakePo4aBoundary

=back


=head3 More detailed example

Original document (POD formatted):

 |=head1 NAME
 |
 |dummy - a dummy program
 |
 |=head1 AUTHOR
 |
 |me

Then, the following addendum will ensure that a section (in French) about
the translator is added at the end of the file (in French, "TRADUCTEUR"
means "TRANSLATOR", and "moi" means "me").

 |PO4A-HEADER:mode=after;position=AUTEUR;beginboundary=^=head
 |
 |=head1 TRADUCTEUR
 |
 |moi
 |

To put your addendum before the AUTHOR, use the following header:

 PO4A-HEADER:mode=after;position=NOM;beginboundary=^=head1

This works because the next line matching the B<beginboundary> /^=head1/ after
the section "NAME" (translated to "NOM" in French), is the one declaring the
authors. So, the addendum will be put between both sections. Note that if 
another section is added between NAME and AUTHOR sections later, po4a
will wrongfully put the addenda before the new section.

To avoid this you may accomplish the same using B<mode>=I<before>:

 PO4A-HEADER:mode=before;position=^=head1 AUTEUR

=head1 How does it work?

This chapter gives you a brief overview of the po4a internals, so that you
may feel more confident to help us maintaining and improving it. It may also
help you understanding why it does not do what you expected, and how to
solve your problems.

The po4a architecture is object oriented. The
L<Locale::Po4a::TransTractor(3pm)|TransTractor> class is the common ancestor to
all po4a parsers. This strange name comes from the fact that it is at the same
time in charge of translating document and extracting strings.

More formally, it takes a document to translate plus a PO file containing
the translations to use as input while producing two separate outputs:
Another PO file (resulting of the extraction of translatable strings from
the input document), and a translated document (with the same structure than
the input one, but with all translatable strings replaced with content of
the input PO). Here is a graphical representation of this:

   Input document --\                             /---> Output document
                     \      TransTractor::       /       (translated)
                      +-->--   parse()  --------+
                     /                           \
   Input PO --------/                             \---> Output PO
                                                         (extracted)


This little bone is the core of all the po4a architecture. If you omit the input
PO and the output document, you get B<po4a-gettextize>. If you provide both
input and disregard the output PO, you get B<po4a-translate>. The B<po4a> calls
TransTractor twice and calls B<msgmerge -U> between these TransTractor
invocations to provide one-stop solution with a single configuration file.
Please see L<Locale::Po4a::TransTractor(3pm)> for more details.

=head1 Open-source projects using po4a

Here is a very partial list of projects that use po4a in production for their
documentation. If you want to add your project to the list, just drop
us an email (or a Merge Request).

=over 

=item 

adduser (man): users and groups management tool.

=item 

apt (man, docbook): Debian package manager.

=item

aptitude (docbook, svg): terminal-based package manager for Debian

=item 

L<F-Droid website|https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroid-website> (markdown): 
installable catalogue of FOSS (Free and Open Source
Software) applications for the Android platform.

=item 

L<git|https://github.com/jnavila/git-manpages-l10n> (asciidoc):
distributed version-control system for tracking changes in source code.

=item 

L<Linux manpages|https://salsa.debian.org/manpages-l10n-team/manpages-l10n> (man)

This project provides an infrastructure for translating many manpages
to different languages, ready for integration into several major
distributions (Arch Linux, Debian and derivatives, Fedora).

=item 

L<Stellarium|https://github.com/Stellarium/stellarium> (HTML):
a free open source planetarium for your computer. po4a is used to
translate the sky culture descriptions.

=item

Other item to sort out:
L<https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroid-website/>
L<https://github.com/fsfe/reuse-docs/pull/61>

=back

=head1 FAQ

=head2 How do you pronounce po4a?

I personally vocalize it as L<pouah|https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pouah>, which
is a French onomatopoetic that we use in place of yuck :) I may have a strange sense of humor :)

=head2 What about the other translation tools for documentation using gettext?

There are a few of them. Here is a possibly incomplete list, and more tools are
coming at the horizon.

=over

=item B<poxml>

This is the tool developed by KDE people to handle DocBook XML. AFAIK, it
was the first program to extract strings to translate from documentation to
PO files, and inject them back after translation.

It can only handle XML, and only a particular DTD. I'm quite unhappy with
the handling of lists, which end in one big msgid. When the list become big,
the chunk becomes harder to swallow.

=item B<po-debiandoc>

This program done by Denis Barbier is a sort of precursor of the po4a SGML
module, which more or less deprecates it. As the name says, it handles only
the DebianDoc DTD, which is more or less a deprecated DTD.

=item B<xml2po.py>

Used by the GIMP Documentation Team since 2004, works quite well even if,
as the name suggests, only with XML files and needs specially configured
makefiles.

=item B<Sphinx>

The Sphinx Documentation Project also uses gettext extensively to manage its
translations. Unfortunately, it works only for a few text formats, rest and
markdown, although it is perhaps the only tool that does this managing the whole
translation process.

=back

The main advantages of po4a over them are the ease of extra content addition
(which is even worse there) and the ability to achieve gettextization.

=head2 SUMMARY of the advantages of the gettext based approach

=over 2

=item

The translations are not stored along with the original, which makes it
possible to detect if translations become out of date.

=item

The translations are stored in separate files from each other, which prevents
translators of different languages from interfering, both when submitting
their patch and at the file encoding level.

=item

It is based internally on B<gettext> (but B<po4a> offers a very simple
interface so that you don't need to understand the internals to use it).
That way, we don't have to re-implement the wheel, and because of their
wide use, we can think that these tools are more or less bug free.

=item

Nothing changed for the end-user (beside the fact translations will
hopefully be better maintained). The resulting documentation file
distributed is exactly the same.

=item

No need for translators to learn a new file syntax and their favorite PO
file editor (like Emacs' PO mode, Lokalize or Gtranslator) will work just fine.

=item

gettext offers a simple way to get statistics about what is done, what should
be reviewed and updated, and what is still to do. Some example can be found
at those addresses:

 - https://docs.kde.org/stable5/en/kdesdk/lokalize/project-view.html
 - http://www.debian.org/intl/l10n/

=back

But everything isn't green, and this approach also has some disadvantages
we have to deal with.

=over 2

=item

Addenda are… strange at the first glance.

=item

You can't adapt the translated text to your preferences, like splitting a
paragraph here, and joining two other ones there. But in some sense, if
there is an issue with the original, it should be reported as a bug anyway.

=item

Even with an easy interface, it remains a new tool people have to learn.

One of my dreams would be to integrate somehow po4a to Gtranslator or
Lokalize. When a documentation file is opened, the strings are
automatically extracted, and a translated file + po file can be
written to disk. If we manage to do an MS Word (TM) module (or at
least RTF) professional translators may even use it.

=back

=head1 SEE ALSO

=over

=item

The documentation of the all-in-one tool that you should use: L<po4a(1)>.

=item

The documentation of the individual po4a scripts: L<po4a-gettextize(1)>,
L<po4a-updatepo(1)>, L<po4a-translate(1)>, L<po4a-normalize(1)>.

=item

The additional helping scripts:
L<msguntypot(1)>, L<po4a-display-man(1)>, L<po4a-display-pod(1)>.

=item

The parsers of each formats, in particular to see the options accepted by each
of them: L<Locale::Po4a::AsciiDoc(3pm)> L<Locale::Po4a::Dia(3pm)>,
L<Locale::Po4a::Guide(3pm)>, L<Locale::Po4a::Ini(3pm)>,
L<Locale::Po4a::KernelHelp(3pm)>, L<Locale::Po4a::Man(3pm)>,
L<Locale::Po4a::RubyDoc(3pm)>, L<Locale::Po4a::Texinfo(3pm)>,
L<Locale::Po4a::Text(3pm)>, L<Locale::Po4a::Xhtml(3pm)>,
L<Locale::Po4a::Yaml(3pm)>, L<Locale::Po4a::BibTeX(3pm)>,
L<Locale::Po4a::Docbook(3pm)>, L<Locale::Po4a::Halibut(3pm)>,
L<Locale::Po4a::LaTeX(3pm)>, L<Locale::Po4a::Pod(3pm)>,
L<Locale::Po4a::Sgml(3pm)>, L<Locale::Po4a::TeX(3pm)>,
L<Locale::Po4a::Wml(3pm)>, L<Locale::Po4a::Xml(3pm)>.

=item

The implementation of the core infrastructure:
L<Locale::Po4a::TransTractor(3pm)> (particularly important to understand the
code organization), L<Locale::Po4a::Chooser(3pm)>, L<Locale::Po4a::Po(3pm)>,
L<Locale::Po4a::Common(3pm)>. Please also check the F<CONTRIBUTING.md> file in
the source tree.

=back

=head1 AUTHORS

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

=cut

LocalWords: PO gettext SGML XML texinfo perl gettextize fr Lokalize KDE updatepo
LocalWords: Gtranslator gettextization VCS regexp boundary
LocalWords: lang TransTractor debconf diff poxml debiandoc LocalWords
LocalWords: Denis barbier linuxfr org Quinson
