Entities vs olinks

[Kate.Wringe@sybase.com]

We need to tie our software resource-strings
( e.g., the strings that contain the text used in dialogs, windows, etc.,)
 to our documentation but we can't use entities. Any suggestions?

The problem we discovered with entities
is that our translation software is unable to display the entity values
(unlike our XML authoring software-oXygen).
So, our translators are forced to work
with the entity names (e.g., &ml_oracle_driver; ) instead of the entity
values (iAnywhere Solutions 12 - Oracle ODBC driver). As
you can imagine, this severely limits
the number of entities we can have in our documentation.

Currently, we have about 14,000 instances
in our collection that contain the text from our software-resource strings.
These instances are currently tagged with a guilabel
element. Also, our software resource-strings
are available in an XML (XLIFF) file that we would love to be able to connect
to our XML docs.

An idea that we have been kicking around
involves embedding the entity value (e.g, iAnywhere 12-Oracle ODBC driver)
within the xml file (so that the 
translators can see the text). We were
thinking about a solution that would work similar to how we use our olinks
(except that it wouldn't create links in the output).

This is currently how our olinks are
processed: 
1) We use xslt to build olink.db files
for each of our books.
2) We author in oXygen, so we insert
our olinks using an olink dialog that oXygen implemented for us. Our olink
tags look like the following in our
documentation: <olink targetdoc="dbadmin"
targetptr="da-backup-dbs-5679299">Types of backup</olink>.

3) The contents of the olink tag (e.g.,Types
of backup) are replaced during the xsltbuild; although, they are not updated
in the xml files during the build. To update
the files, we periodically run a refresh
olink tool within oXygen.

Our idea was to use the XLIFF file to
create a .db file that could be used to insert olinks or xlinks in the
XML files. The XSLT build would replace/update
the software-resource-string text during
the build.  

Has anyone done something like this?
 Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. We are also
wondering whether we should
attempt such a solution with the olink
element (with an attribute) or the xlink element.

Thank you (again!),

Kate


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Kate Wringe | Tech Writer 2| Sybase 445 Wes Graham Way, Waterloo, ON, N2L 6R2 Canada | Tel: (519) 883-6838 | kate.wringe@sybase.com | www.sybase.com