Re: [Gretl-users] Translation of gretl documentation

On Wed, Feb 11, 2004 at 04:44:56PM +0100, Cristian Rigamonti wrote: Well, I spoke too early, I didn't know the whole manual xml files were already translated into Spanish! Given that, the problem of converting txt->xml disappears, and I think it's really worth considering to switch to a single xml repository for the gretl command reference. The idea would be to have a single xml file (for each language) containing all the information about gretl commands, organized in fields such as: name, category (currently used in .hlp files), short description (currently used in gretl.hlp file), synopsis (currently used as "Usage:" in gretlcli.hlp and as "Arguments:" in cmdref.xml), examples, description. During each rebuild of the documentation, a script parses the xml file and outputs the three files: gretl.hlp, gretlcli.hlp, cmdref.xml (each of them would maintain the current format). The main benefit of this approach: a single file (for each language) to maintain/update instead of three; less redundancy (consider that gretlcli.hlp and cmdref.xml share 95% of their content, gretlcli.hlp and gretl.hlp share about 40 commands). The main drawback: it all makes sense if the entries (particularly the "description" field) for each command have to be uniform across the three files (as they are at the moment); if one would prefer e.g. a longer description in the pdf/html manual and a shorter one in the online help, this approach would not be that convenient. The main implementation problems: - Design the new xml repository and write a script to import existing information into it (in the the most accurate and automated way) - Write a script to generate the output files from the xml file Let me know if that sounds worth to try out (I'm supposed to hack around with XML in the next few weeks anyway, so that would be a good example to work out...) Cri -- [ Cristian Rigamonti - cri(a)linux.it - +39 347 1043466 ] [ GPG/PGP Key-Id: 943A5F0E - http://www.linux.it/~cri/cri.asc ] [ Stop software patents in the EU: http://swpat.ffii.org ]