El Domingo 08 de Febrero 2004 18:21, Cristian Rigamonti escribió: Hello Cristian, I am translating gretl to Spanish. Apart from the program I have translated the web pages and the help files. (In a following step I would like to translate also the data files). It is probably that I am not doing this in a very efficient way since I have not thought about the practical questions that you are querying. So I will answer how I have done it: I downloaded the HTML files and translated them being carefull to do no one change about formatting, and saving the translated files adding "_es" ("es" is the code for the spanish language, in your case, "it") to their names. I "translated" the screenshots as well. Really, I did'nt thought about this, so I translated directly the help files. After two or three updatings I noticed that Allin updates the help files each time there is a new command or a new tool, but I cannot update the translated files so frequently, so I asked Allin to leave accessible also the english help files to the spanish users, so they may use these for reading the documentation about the new features. -- Ignacio Díaz-Emparanza Dpto. de Economía Aplicada III (Econometría y Estadística) UPV-EHU http://www.bl.ehu.es/~etpdihei/

On Sun, 8 Feb 2004, Cristian Rigamonti wrote: No, at present the web pages are not in CVS, but it might be a good idea to add them. Since the information that appears on the web pages is not required in any other format than HTML, I have not stored them in XML. But I do have one "convenience" feature: they are stored in "template" form so that when I make a new release I can run run a simple shell script to update the date and version information. I will plan to add these "template" HTML files to CVS. Good thinking, but unfortunately this is not automated! The XML files are used to generate the PDF manual, the HTML help files for gnome, and the compiled HTML help files for Windows. But the online help files are not (yet) linked into that system; I edit them in parallel. Does anyone have suggestions for where to look for good plain text formatting of XML source? I'd say that the "command reference" part may change slightly from release to release (usually in the form of adding something, since I try to be careful to preserve backward compatibility). Other sections may have bits added from time to time. The only "change in format" that I'm contemplating would be setting up a system to generate the online help files from the XML sources. But this is still just notional; I think it would be quite complicated. Allin Cottrell

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 ]

I've added a couple of files to a new subdir of "doc" in gretl CVS, named "commands". gretl_commands.dtd is a first stab at a simple DTD for commands. It will need some extensions (e.g. to allow for structure such as graphics and equations within the "description" element). test_command.xml is a trial run, an incomplete account of the ols command that validates against the DTD. Allin.