[Gretl-devel] translating gretl docs

I've been working lately on making the production of the PDF Command (and function) Reference from the XML source files more robust. This leads me to a couple of observations and a question. First, translating the User's Guide is by now a massive task -- equivalent to translating a big book. But translating the two reference XML files (gretl_commands_en.xml and gretl_functions_en.xml) is relatively manageable, and doing so basically gets you the PDF Reference "for free". There's a certain amount of supplementary text in a few TeX files, namely cmdref.tex, funcref.tex, operators.tex, comments.tex, optarg.tex and reftables.tex (about 20 kbytes total); if these are translated too then the whole Reference is internationalized. I see that the front page of the Italian Reference has a note saying that the translation is frozen as of gretl 1.7.1 but actually that's not true: since the Italian XML files are up to date, so (basically) is the Reference. So maybe we could remove that note? Now for the question. The big problem with translation of the XML files is ensuring that the translations stay up to date. I'm wondering if xml2po might be helpful here. I think Alexander Gedranovich raised this question a while back. I didn't look into it at the time but now I've done so. Xml2po offers the facility of stripping the translatable material out of an XML file and making a pot file (essentially each paragraph becomes a "msgid"), and it also gives a means of merging translations in a po file back into XML. So we could use the usual "gettext" procedure, meaning that any updates to the English versions would be immediately apparent to translators -- and any newly added material would appear in the translated versions in English (until it gets translated). I've put a sample pot file (for the function reference) at http://users.wfu.edu/cottrell/tmp/gretl_functions.pot . Comments invited. Allin