Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: Multi-language documentation

[Yann Dirson <ydirson@alcove.fr>]

On Fri, Sep 28, 2001 at 10:42:03AM +0900, Michael Westbay wrote:
> You might want to look at SmartDoc:

Thanks, I did not know about it.

>   http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~dp8t-asm/java/tools/SmartDoc/
> 
> You can create blocks with different lang="..." attributes so that the 
> original source may be bilingual, with monolingual output.  When I first 
> started with DocBook, I thought that I could do that, but soon found that it 
> isn't set up to filter out only the lang="..." attributes of a specified 
> language.

DocBook's "lang" attribute does not have this meaning of alternative
text.  It's here to allow you to quote things in foreign languages I
think.

In SmartDoc, they don't have the tracking of a modification date,
which is critical to keep translations in sync (this requires specific
editor support anyway).  And the approach of putting everything in the
same file, although it makes the ID mechanism I mentionned useless,
does not help concurent work on different languages, and is not
generalisable to the learning tool I described :}

> It is extensible, so a SmartDoc --> DocBook filter shouldn't be unheard of.

Their DTD looks like slightly improved HTML... a bit poor when you're
used to DocBook :}

-- 
Yann Dirson <Yann.Dirson@fr.alcove.com>                 http://www.alcove.com/
Free-Software Engineer				      Ingénieur Logiciel-Libre
Free-Software time manager    	       Responsable du temps Informatique-Libre