[Po4a-devel]Design of the (La)TeX module

[Martin Quinson]

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On Sat, Dec 11, 2004 at 09:53:12PM +0100, Denis Barbier wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 11, 2004 at 06:14:13PM +0100, Nicolas Fran=E7ois wrote:
> [...]
> > Do you think it is better not to translate them separately, except for =
the
> > commands of a category?
>=20
> Sounds more logical, yes.
>=20
> > Then I would like to add indent, noindent, index, label and footnote in
> > this category.
>=20
> I do not know what to do with the first two because typographic rules
> depend on languages, so they should not be automatically written into
> translated documents.

The typographic rules are taken into account by TeX directly, so when the
author uses the \noindent macro, it should be on a purpose not depending of
the language, such as removing automatic indentation of a code snipet. This
being said, I agree with Denis: you don't want to hide them from the
translator.

This brings me to the idea of \usepackage{babel}. I think each translated
document should contain it, with the target language as optional argument.
You may want to specify the input encoding, too, unless you convert all =E9=
 to
\'e.

> It seems indeed logical to write \index argument into its own msgid.
> \label argument should not be translated.

Strongly approved. I don't feel that the position of the command induce a
specific behaviour. Simply, \label is an ignored command (its content is an
internal reference not shown in final document) and \index is what I called
"sectionning command".

> About \footnote, I do not understand how you can put it into a separate
> msgid, because footnotes can appear anywhere in a sequence and you then
> need a marker to tell where to insert them.

This is like in sgml. You want to move them into another msgid, but the need
to put them in the right place of the sentence kind of prevents you to do
so. If you simply use a new tag for that (such as "<PO4AFOOTNOTEPOSITION>"
or whatever), you'll have to deal with the situation where there is several
footnotes, and the translator wants/needs to change their order. This is
possible, but cumbersome.

Bye, Mt.



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