[Po4a-devel]Some comments

[Jordi Vilalta]

Hello.

I'm following the po4a development for some months. I think that it has so 
much future, since it's well structured and it can ease a lot the work of 
translating documents. Good job ;)

I would like to help in the development, but I've never used Perl :(

Then I thought about translating the po4a itself to spanish (es) and 
catalan (ca). I've seen po/bin/po4a.pot and po/pod/po4a-pod.pot. May I 
translate both? And something else?

Recently I tried the po4a-gettextize with a DocBook XML document that I'm
starting to write and I found some problems. (I'm also newbie in DocBook, 
so some of the following issues may not be po4a problems)

At first it gave me the next error:

Argument "pi" isn't numeric in sprintf at 
/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.2/Locale/Po4a/Sgml.pm line 618, <IN> line 2.
Use of uninitialized value in sprintf at 
/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.2/Locale/Po4a/Sgml.pm line 618, <IN> line 2.
ossa-pre/index.xml:1:0: Unknown SGML event type: 

Then I deleted the first line, which is xml specific:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
and this error disappeared. Apart from this line, the rest is a valid SGML 
DocBook. Would there be an easy way to auto-detect and bypass it? (Then 
I think you could officialy say that po4a supports DocBook XML documents 
at the same level as DocBook SGML)

About the entities there are some issues. The first one is in the included 
files, which I think it's already been reported (bug #300591). It repeats 
the following lines infinitely:

substr outside of string at 
/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.2/Locale/Po4a/Sgml.pm line 226.
Use of uninitialized value in string eq at 
/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.2/Locale/Po4a/Sgml.pm line 227.
Use of uninitialized value in string eq at 
/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.2/Locale/Po4a/Sgml.pm line 228.
Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at 
/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.2/Locale/Po4a/Sgml.pm line 229.

The other one is about standard entities (simple code expansions), whose 
contens should mostly be translated. It seems that currently they're 
simply ignored. They can have some difficulty in parsing, because they can 
contain directly the text to be translated, or some kind of tags, that 
should also be parsed. It's important to be able to easily translate 
entities, because they are widely used for repeated fragments of text. (At 
the beginning it could be nice to get all the string of the entity to 
translate)

The inclusion entities are also important, but if we could treat each file 
alone it would be good enough for now :)

I've also found that there may be some attributes important to translate 
(such as the "lang" one), and it seems to be ignored for now.

It's what I've noticed from the first experience with po4a. It would be 
very nice if these things could be worked out, because those could enable 
people to use po4a with the most commonly used DocBook features.

Thanks for your time,

Jordi Vilalta