Allin,
Conditioning the choice of the language on the IP address is
problematic in the sense that there may be people in an
English-speaking country who would prefer to have a non-English
documentation. Or you may have people in a Spanish-speaking country
that would prefer an English documentation ...
For a Windows system you can play a bit with the installer, by adding
a step where the user has to choose the documentation. The chosen
documentation would then be downloaded and added to the gretl
installation. Moreover, those who want could then download the
documentation in several languages. Unfortunately, this is
Windows-only and I don't know if this is possible for Linux or Mac.
Yet another possibility would be to choose a default format for the
documentation, like e.g. English (US letter paper). Then you could
mention somewhere that the documentation is available in other
formats, together with a description of how to get it and where to
install it. Now, I am not a programmer, but I suppose it should not be
that hard to write a routine that automates all this: downloading the
desired file(s) and copying it to the local gretl installation. Then,
the end-user will only have to hit a button in the "Help" menu and
select his preferred version. Another advantage of such a solution
would be that the documentation can be updated independently from the
program. I understand perfectly that this requires adding a feature to
gretl. However, I believe that such a feature is much less of a bloat
than adding tons and tons of documents that a particular user won't
(can't) read anyway.
Best wishes,
jean
On 11/21/05, Allin Cottrell <cottrell(a)wfu.edu> wrote:
We've now (at least temporarily) standardized on PDF and plain
text
as the primary formats for the gretl manual (we can make both win32
compiled HTML and gnome HTML/XML, but these formats are were never
properly integrated in terms of searchability and contextualization,
and I really don't have time to work seriously on that).
So I'm now thinking it would be a good idea to distribute the PDF
manual files with gretl. The only problem is that we have four
variants of these files:
* English (US letter paper)
* English (A4 paper)
* Italian (A4)
* Spanish (A4)
I think it would be "bloat" to distribute all of these files with
the gretl package for Windows and the gretl source package (or the
rpm). We're talking about approximately 1 MB per variant. So I'm
looking for clever suggestions. One thought that occurred to me is
to have a "PDF server" (either at Wake Forest University or at
Sourceforge), which would check the IP address of a gretl
installation requesting the manual and try to determine which
variant was most appropriate. Then we could do one download, after
which the relevant manual files would be on the local computer.
Any ideas, either (a) on how exactly to implement the above, or (b)
in the form of better proposals?
Allin Cottrell
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